Connect with Dave Evans:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evansda11/
Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm here today with Dave Evans. Dave is the co-founder and CEO of the digital manufacturing ecosystem company, Fictiv. Since its founding in 2013, Fictiv has manufactured more than 19 million parts for early-stage companies and large enterprises, driving innovation with agility, from prototype to production and ensuring supply chain predictability and success for customers in industries from automotive and robotics to healthcare and aerospace. Dave, welcome to the show.
Dave Evans: Hey, thanks much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Lisa Ryan: Please share your background and what made you start Fictive.
Dave Evans: Yeah, for sure. I'm your classic engineer who likes to solve problems—I studied mechanical engineering, mechatronics, and mechanical electrical systems. And I'm an auto guy.
I started my career at Ford, building infotainment systems or dashboards of cars. What we were trying to do there was put consumer electronics into vehicles. So you put your iPhone or iPad these things into the dashboard of a car. And the challenge we ran into at Ford, which is still a problem today, is around development cycles.
A vehicle can take four to six years to build a new platform. Meanwhile, you'll get a new consumer device every six to nine months. And you'll get 12 iterations of a consumer device and the time it takes to launch one vehicle when you get in your plane, land, and rent that Mustang. As you're driving around the one in California, winds blow in your hair, and you go to use the touchscreen, and it's horrible, or it feels ten years old. It's because it is. And from my experience at Ford, how do you increase the speed of building new products?
And what are the barriers to developing that and the thesis developed at Florida, which we've worked on for almost ten years? First, Fictiv was that if you could speed up the development cycle, you could reduce the risk of getting new products to market, and you unlock innovation for many companies to do that.
And we built the company based on how you make hardware, physical goods, and products at the speed of software. We're based in Silicon Valley, don't let all the software folks like Facebook, Amazon, or Dropbox have all the fun. We wanted to build tools for mechanical engineers and physical product companies to build products faster.
So if you fast forward to today, That's what we've built. We've built a system to simplify sourcing and build this operating system. This digital operating system probably makes custom mechanical parts. And we find factories with machines which are idle or have extra capacity all over the world.
And we're allowing engineers and supply chain teams to order custom mechanical components from all these idle machines all over the place. We don't own a factory. I don't have an injection molding machine. I don't have a sheet metal press. I don't have a CNC machine, but we are allowing an engineer at Honeywell to order parts.
From these, it machines through all this digital software we have done. And like you said, Lisa, it's 20 million parts now. So, since we've published that it's up, we built 20 million parts through this network. So, it's not our first rodeo, and I think we are changing how companies think about bringing products to market and driving agility into their supply chain. And I like to believe we are just on day one of that journey because it feels like the work we could do like we just started.
Lisa Ryan: At the beginning, you were talking about driving that car and the wind flying in your hair. Sorry, I'm still there. And then going to that touch screen,...
