Episode 426 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Natan Linder, CEO & Co-Founder of Tulip.
There are very few entrepreneurs in Boston who have built multiple tech companies to a billion+ valuation, but Natan is one of them (Tulip & Formlabs). He is a “builder” in the truest sense of the word, focusing on building what he calls “important things” rather than just the latest “shiny object.”
In our conversation, we have a discussion about Physical AI, meaning AI that lives outside of the digital domain in things like robotics and self-driving cars. Natan believes we are hitting a “ChatGPT moment” for the physical world, so it was interesting to hear his perspective on this trend.
Tulip is the leader in frontline operations. They help companies of all sizes and industries equip their workforces with connected, composable, and intelligent tools. With Tulip’s no-code platform, manufacturers can digitize processes, collect real-time data, and drive continuous improvement by using AI and without writing a line of code. The company recently announced a $120M Series D round of funding at a $1.3B valuation.
In this episode of our podcast, we also cover:
- Natan’s background growing up in Israel, including a great story of building a satellite dish from scratch with his father and grandfather when he was only 11 years old.
- Getting his career started in mobile and running an R&D center for Samsung before moving to Boston to join Rethink Robotics as one of its first employees, so it was a perfect opportunity to get his perspective on the future of humanoid robots.
- The founding story of Formlabs, along with his Co-Founders Max Lobovsky and David Cranor, plus the details of their record breaking Kickstarter and one of my favorite stories – that being the legendary story of the “stuck elevator” pitch that led to an investment from Mitch Kapor.
- The origin story of Tulip and how they are modernizing the world’s most complex manufacturing floors, plus lots of details on their platform, use cases and the company’s culture.
- The importance of the “Builder” mindset and why Natan believes Boston is the premier place to build companies that solve real-world problems.
- And so much more!
This podcast is brought to you by one of the strongest longtime supporters of the local startup ecosystem, Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. With more than 1,500 bankers and relationship advisors and $44B in loans as of Q4 2025 – SVB delivers expert guidance, specialized products and a team that knows the innovation economy inside and out. Learn more at SVB.com.
Transcript
Keith Cline (02:56)
Thanks so much for joining us.
Natan Linder (02:57)
Thank you for having me, Keith.
Keith Cline (03:01)
Yes, it is awesome to talk to you. I feel like this is like an overdue podcast. Like I’ve had you on my radar for a long time and I reached out and I was so excited that you agreed to do this because when I look at entrepreneurs in the Boston tech community, there’s some amazing, amazing entrepreneurs that have scaled companies, but there’s not a lot of them that have scaled multiple companies to the magnitude that you have. So we’re going to talk about the great companies that you’ve been building. But before we get into that I saw you had a post on LinkedIn that’s very relevant. Obviously it’s AI oriented because that’s what everybody just talks about. But you said it was the chat GPT moment for physical AI. What did that mean? What’s that mean for the manufacturing industry, which obviously Tulip is deeply involved in?
Natan Linder (03:37)
Yep.
Yep.
I think, first of all, think credit should go where credit is due. And I probably was echoing Jensen Huang from NVIDIA, who kind of declared this year as the, you know, there’s a chat GPT moment for physical AI. And I think the past three years or so, unless you’re living under some kind of rock, we are washed by AI on a daily basis. you know, I think in many walks of life are, you between very excitingly testing many different applications for AI ⁓ or doom-scrolling AI and getting very terrified some combination thereof. And the resistance is futile actually, because it’s really happening. AI represents a new type of utility and intelligence is a new form of compute. By and large, most of it,
Keith Cline (04:31)
⁓ True.
Natan Linder (04:48)
as it’s perceived more recently in the past few years, as I mentioned, is in digital space, meaning stuff you do in front of a computer, whether you’re writing code or creating software architecture and generating code, deploying it, or making marketing campaigns, or thinking through your next design project. And we’re sitting in the Tulip Studio and I know Tom here, our producer, he’s like going nuts with like…you know, all the things that video and, you know, visual models are doing and combination thereof. That said, there’s a lot of AI application outside of the digital domain. So it’s kind of simple. You know, most of us, I think, reside in the physical world where there are streets and offices and factories and labs and all these places where people do work. And in those environments to deploy even the digital form of AI is really complex.
And I think the mind goes, okay, this is physical AI. And I think the most common example for that is self-driving cars, which uses world models and various kinds of vision-based machine learning and other models to solve a problem we call mobility. And that’s a form of physical AI. Another one is ⁓ robotics.
Humans are fascinated with robotics because it’s, know, how we, know, science fiction does that to us. And that’s a good thing, but ⁓ it’s just a reserved word for various form factors of automation. And some of them are kind of look like us, we call those humanoids, but there are many other types of robots and you need to train them. You need to make them do something in the physical world. So they need a brain. So the phase of technologies that kind of, there are many types of technologies to do that.
Usually involves a lot of example or direct programming, understanding the manipulation and the feedback loops to have a good robotic interaction. So that’s another form of physical AI. And these new types of models are really helping to do that because you use a lot of examples and you can get to better brains. But my posts, it’s actually a pretty simple, but I think a very important… idea and addition and that’s what we’ve been working on is that humans are not going anywhere. And if they are, what’s the point? You know, if they are, then what’s the point? You know, I mean, I like working and I think ⁓ humans who work in Tulip like working and work is important and also, you know, it’s okay. mean, and you know, so we have to make AI work for the humans.
Keith Cline (07:18)
Hopefully not.
Right?
Natan Linder (07:39)
especially in the areas we operate in. They could do work, not necessarily in a nice studio and cubicles and offices like we have here. They do it in warehouses and labs and factories, assembly floors, where have you. And they need to operate alongside AI that manifests in the AGVs, so the autonomous ground vehicles that maybe move stuff or the humanoid robot that maybe one day sort of will be really helpful. Or with the digital system that they are not fluent with what is an SAP or a SCADA system for that matter, and every combination thereof. yeah, and that’s what, you know, one of the areas the two is building and that’s part of the partnership we’ve announced with NVIDIA I think…
There is so much interest in this and so much resources and brain power that is significant that moves this forward, that there is kind of a watershed moment that we are seeing this stuff getting implemented and creating a ton of really ⁓ measurable business outcomes that are not in, I would say they’re outside of the AI wash, AI for everything, blah, blah, blah kind of stuff. And examples of that, there are many. And I can give you a couple. ⁓ We’re seeing, we do a lot of work in the regulated space. So think about lots of the products that we are consuming, whether it’s a drug or a medical device or even your car. They’re not just manufactured randomly. There’s regulations and laws and how can you actually do this?
Humans actually need to do a lot of work to make sure that product can meet like a ⁓ real sort of you know quality requirements to be shipped and that’s a lot of paperwork and a lot of SOPs, you know standard work studying all per standard operating procedures and like and You know agents are really good at reading and deciphering and saying hey human, know, I did all this work. Can you confirm? It actually better than us and that’s improving quality. So this is an example where you know, is this digital AI, is this physical AI? mean, once this agent is running and collecting the information from the SOP, the test gauge, the camera that took the evidence picture, so suddenly all those modalities are mixed up and that’s not your ChatGPT prompt, you know? That’s something else and that is an example of where physical AI, and it’s here. So just to give it a bit of flavor, so that’s…
That’s what we’re working on with our customers with NVIDIA and it’s like, it’s super exciting. No going back. It’s like resistance is futile.
Keith Cline (10:32)
That there’s so much, yeah.
Well, there’s so much going on and I’m gonna pick your brain ⁓ in a couple of minutes here about the humanoids stuff. One of the fun facts I learned when I was going through your background was like, wait, you worked at Rethink Robotics? So I don’t wanna go there yet, but we’re gonna talk about.
Natan Linder (10:46)
Yeah, okay, we don’t have to go there yet. I wrote a full rant on humanoids, you know, might get me in trouble with some folks, but it’s okay. have a reference on that.
Keith Cline (10:52)
Yeah, okay.
This is why I love doing this podcast is to find out fun facts like that. But I wanna talk about your background. what were you like as a child? Like in the Israeli Air Force, you were involved in computer vision, digital photography. So you obviously seem very curious type of individual growing up, right?
Natan Linder (11:04)
Okay.
As it as child ⁓ yeah i was probably also very annoying highly opinionated really bad listening skills not very focused ⁓ I grew up ⁓ small village ⁓ outside of Jerusalem that’s in israel and free to roam and ⁓ my grandfather was a kind of a He was an electrician and a carpenter, very handy kind of person. We lived right next to his house. So I kind of grew up with tools and machines and built stuff all my life. And my dad is an engineer. And so in 1989, I think I’m about 11 or thereabouts, the first big project we did together was building a four meter diameter parabola satellite dish with controls.
Keith Cline (12:18)
What?
Natan Linder (12:19)
Yeah, that’s what,
Keith Cline (12:19)
What?
Natan Linder (12:20)
Because Israel had like one TV channel and it was working on a second commercial TV channel, no cable TV. And we got back from the United States, because my mom is a doctor, she was at Children’s in Columbus, Ohio, we were there for a little bit. And he came back with all these magazines and widgets and…stuff needed to build a satellite dish because he wanted to catch the edges of the beacons of the Astra satellite network that ⁓ back then there’s no DRM. It’s like tuning a radio, which I know like 80 % of your listeners don’t know what that means to tune a radio, but you actually had to like turn knobs to figure out like how to get the right channel on stationary radio.
Keith Cline (13:07)
Hey! Yeah, yeah.
Well, the TV with the rabbit ears, I remember that. Like you had to like, yeah, yeah.
Natan Linder (13:18)
Yeah, there was also that.
You needed a really large satellite dish to get to the satellites that covered Greece and Cyprus and all that area. we, and you couldn’t buy it, so we built it. ⁓ yeah, was fiberglass and aluminum and it was built out of four quarters and put in to be the full parabola.
And then you have to do control, you have to program this thing. And so we used a Gould PLC, so that was one of the first thing I ever programmed was a Gould PLC. It’s a German company not many people know about. There was, yeah, and I’m working alongside my granddad and my dad, so I was the go fetch, do this, do that, but I also learned how to program there. we had to build a little keypad, because you had to connect that.
Keith Cline (13:59)
Wait, and you’re 11?
Yeah.
Natan Linder (14:15)
To the PLC so you can press ampersand 33.33 which means go 33 degrees, .33 east and then blah blah blah north and that would position the satellite dish to look at a certain area in the sky. And then you would go to the tuner effectively and you would tune to get the right signal and then you would see CNN for free. So that was the end result. That was the project, like how to get television.
Keith Cline (14:40)
Okay, so I’m envisioning this.
Natan Linder (14:45)
So that’s a lot of engineering and a lot of production and a lot of, I don’t know.
Keith Cline (14:50)
You’re basically building your own DirecTV satellite. Yeah, that is so cool.
Natan Linder (14:53)
Yeah, because there was no TV, you know, and it was possible.
Keith Cline (14:58)
Well, after university, what struck out to me was, or what stood out to me was the fact that you really were at a point in a leadership role very quickly where you were co-founder and general manager of a mobile R &D center for Samsung, at a very young age.
Natan Linder (15:15)
Yeah, very young age. was in probably 23, 24. And it’s, you know, it’s like where naivety meets luck meets a moment of need. I was, I was, you know, the two things happened at that time. So this is around 2001 or so.
But actually started earlier during, you know, in Israel a lot of people do their undergrad in three years. That’s just our program because we lose some years for service and whatnot. we also, always find it like Americans sometimes find it shocking and I’ve been here almost 20 years and still it’s every time, you know, I talk to it’s like we work during undergrad. Like everybody, this is not special. It’s like, that’s just normal.
And all kinds of work, not just fancy jobs. I was working for Sun Microsystems. And two things happened. One is that the dot com crashed right around 2000. And it was well felt. And the mobile revolution started. So it’s kind of interesting to sit now when we’re talking about all this, know, AI is the new Gutenberg, print revolution, blah, blah. But those two revolutions kind of happened in parallel.
⁓ And, ⁓ you know, we’re in our 20s and all we wanted to do is we had lots of ideas and very ambitious, you know, aspirations. And ⁓ some of the ideas didn’t completely suck, you know. It’s like, you know, we wanted to bring, I mean, I can show you the patents from 20 years ago, but we wanted to bring AI and machine learning ⁓ software to mobile phones. And for that, you need to build software.
Keith Cline (17:08)
Really? Okay.
Right.
Natan Linder (17:11)
And we were exposed, myself, my co-founder ⁓ at Samsung to this stuff because ⁓ Sun Microsystem at the time, the Israel R &D Center was where the wireless toolkit, was back then, it was a technology called J2ME, so the Java Mobile Edition. And it was built out of Israel. it was, again, it was an amazing school. And they put us in little office and they put in,
Keith Cline (17:30)
Yep, I remember.
Natan Linder (17:41)
Sign on it like don’t feed the students and we were like sleeping under the table and like go to classes sometimes but basically that was like my undergrad but then it .com crashed and there was like you couldn’t raise a dollar and definitely not in Israel and ⁓ but the work we’ve done with Sun got published and ⁓ it was featured in Java one and James Gosling was it that he’s one of the key guys who kind of architected the Java language, saw our work and I don’t know, got some news here and there. then the guy running Samsung in Israel saw us and he said, you guys, instead of starting your company, you should come start the R &D Center for Samsung. And I guess today you would call that an acqui-hire of some sort of a fledgling little company, because we had lots of ideas and I found myself leading that, completely unprepared, ⁓ probably a very, I don’t know, dysfunctional leader in the making. ⁓ But got a lot of shit done and ⁓ learned to do R &D at scale and ship real consumer products and all that kind of stuff. So that’s the Samsung story.
Keith Cline (19:07)
Very cool. Well, fast forward a little bit to Rethink Robotics. So how did you get involved in the company? And just for context, ⁓ like I remember the company well. Like I visited your headquarters way back and have a picture with me and Baxter. ⁓ I think, yeah, I think so. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, no, wasn’t in the Seaport somewhere like, yeah, so later on was.
Natan Linder (19:19)
Yeah.
4-8-5 Mass ⁓ Ave.
That’s it. Yeah.
That’s later on. think I was like employee seven or eight or something like that. what’s the background there? So in 2008, moved to the US basically following my wife who decided to get her MBA. She got into a bunch of great schools. One of them was MIT. She’s kind of a techie. She’s more from cyber security
Keith Cline (19:37)
Okay.
Natan Linder (20:01)
kind of background and MIT was like very appealing to her and also to me you know and like we’re coming into Boston four suitcases no kids kind of situation but I kind of as far as MIT goes I’m pretty old you know because like it’s 30 or 29 or ⁓ whatever I was then it’s kind of old and ⁓ I I’m like okay I’m here what am I gonna do
And I thought it would be like a pit stop because I was going really fast in all those years. In Samsung and Sun and had kind of a good stint in Jerusalem Venture Partner. It was also kind of early stage stuff. And I knew about the Media Lab and I thought, well, if there’s time, there’s always time to do companies, but there’s not always time to do MIT. So I started talking to folks at MIT Media Lab and met some people and I said like, okay, well, probably apply because it’s kind of a great toy store and ⁓ all the big heroes back then for me, know, like in interaction design, like Pattie Maes who eventually ended up being my advisor, and ⁓ Cynthia Breazeal you know, was like a great roboticist, and Hiroshi Ishii, yeah, and all those folks. Rod is kind of like, not to all, but like…
Keith Cline (21:20)
Amazing. A Jibo. She started Jibo. Yep. Yep.
Natan Linder (21:29)
And the lab was kind of like the renegades, the anti-disciplinary, the ethos of the media lab, like demo or die. it’s kind of like really tons of inspiration. And remember, I spent like a decade building interfaces for mobile in the most formative years of mobile. It’s like moving from stupid flip phones to iPhone. That’s the era and kind of seeing the two sides of that. ⁓ So.
So I was very charged with interfaces. So I applied and you don’t know what’s happening when you’re applied to MIT Media Lab because there are no real rules for that. You don’t take standardized tests. It’s more like you chart your own course and you try and find a fit and then you get in and then you work on your imposter syndrome for a bunch of time and then life goes on. So that’s what happened to me. In the process, I met Pattie Maes Professor Maes and
She couldn’t tell me, know, because we’re probably meeting in admissions, and she couldn’t tell me if I’m coming in or out, no idea, but she said, what are doing now? And I’m like, I’m sort, you know, back in the day iTunes was still a thing, you know. I don’t know who uses iTunes anymore. Kind of questionable, right? But I remember I told her, you know, I’m sorting ⁓ the MP3 files I ripped on my iTunes. That was my, she asked me, what am I doing?
Keith Cline (22:44)
I can’t imagine it’s gonna be right.
Natan Linder (22:57)
And then she said, I think you should meet Rod Brooks. because Pattie was doing her work when she was at CSAIL with Rod. And then she moved to the Media Lab and started ⁓ her own group, Ambient Intelligence and then Fluid Interfaces, which I joined. And of course, Rod for me was like meeting Michael Jordan, you know? ⁓ Because we all, like my generation, you know,
I didn’t do Lisp, I did Scheme. We all understood subsumption architectures and kind of read classic papers like elephants don’t play chess and the like. And then I met Rod and he’s like, I’m starting a new company and it’s gonna be robots and they’re gonna live outside of cages and they’re not gonna kill people and they’re gonna be programmable and trainable by whatever. I like your portfolio, do you?
Do you think you want to do that? And I was like, yeah, when should I start? That was the discussion. But the second part of the discussion was like, look, I’ll do whatever, but there is this MIT thing. So we had this handshake agreement that if MIT happens, he lets me go. Because I knew startups and how. And so I joined as the first kind of product guy ⁓ and built all sorts of cool interfaces.
It actually has a dialogue with the journey for Tulip because it forced me to go to factories and start to think, how is that robot that we’re building, Baxter and then Cooper, Cooper was another one we were working on, is gonna actually work in those environments. This is the days before cobot is really a thing. UR is just getting started. Yeah, so that’s.
Keith Cline (24:33)
⁓ that’s right!
just want to bring the visual
in just so people could see the Baxter in action there with Rodney.
Natan Linder (24:57)
Yeah, exactly. that’s until you see like, like a lot, I was working both on the hardware side, like on, you know, what should be the controller on the arm and like, what does it mean to put a robot controller on the arm on one hand, but also how would you program like what’s, what’s the brain, not necessarily every aspect of the brain, where you tie the human aspect to the brain. And so that was like really interesting to me.
But then Pattie decided to accept me and I decided to go to MIT. So I left.
Keith Cline (25:34)
That’s awesome.
So quick question. We have so much to cover. So you talked about humanoids before. Where do you think we stand with that? You see all these companies building these and the demos. Are we?
Natan Linder (25:47)
Yeah, so the team can send you my my rant on it and it’s it’s it’s not that terrible. ⁓ The gist of it is it’s like, I think that humanoids are fun. At some point, the price point and the demand could give it a market, I think more likely in the consumer ish. ⁓
You know, assistive robotics domain, if you ask me. But when it comes to operation, it has almost a self-defeating ⁓ existence equation or a form of ⁓ transition technology. And what I mean by that is that if you talk to real roboticists, and you know, I’ve been enough around them and built some with myself, you know that most of the energy and in the form factor of a robot goes to things like gate maintenance. So like how well does it stand and moves in a physical environment? And I think if you look at what’s happening in China, like from the core hardware aspect, like accurate servo motors combined with good actuation and sensing technology, all that kind of stuff, it’s really hard, but they’re moving really fast. And in GTC, you saw pretty impressive little humanoid robots that go for less than 10K. So it’s not a hardware issue so much. It’s a brain and functionality issue. And the thesis that we’ll build them that they’re going to work in our own environments. And so first of all, our environments are changing. And if you can solve humanoids in scale, meaning that you can actually also orchestrate them and make them do all those tasks.
Why not have six hands? Is a pair of legs the best way to move in a factory? We’re not really bound by human anatomy. I mean, human anatomy is really good to like, you know, run away from lions or pick up berries, you know, and it haven’t changed that much. But it’s not necessarily the best way to like automate like industrial tasks, you know, super micro or large scale like mining, you know. So that’s why I’m saying like the…
We’re missing a ton of hands in operations. So like the science fiction slash, you know, what Elon is telling us to do kind of fall into effect. It’s obviously making a lot of data center ⁓ clock tokens, because you need to train their brains and it’s all good and very exciting. But once we’re done, we don’t need them anymore because we can build so many other types of form factors that use the same hardware configured differently in the new types of factories that we will build in the next decades to come. So that’s my little rant on this and debate. We’ll send you the link so you can include it if you want.
Keith Cline (28:51)
Okay, that’s perfect.
All right, we need to talk about Formlabs. So how did Formlabs come together?
Natan Linder (28:59)
Okay.
The first time I saw Max, he was yelling. He had like a fight. Actually, both of them were yelling, so Neil Gersonfeld and him were yelling at each other in a class called How to Make Almost Anything because Neil was trying to make Max do something Max didn’t want to do. And that’s generally a bad idea, I’d say, working with Max for almost 15 years. But, ⁓ you know.
There are two strongly minded individuals and the class is kind of open-ended but has structure and it was kind of interesting. So Max and I were classmates along with David Cranor who was our third co-founder and you know, Max and David had this idea to build a printer and they did so for SLA and they dragged me in ⁓ pretty early on because there was an idea to kind of build a company around it. And I was kind of the irresponsible adult, I guess, of the crew. And in the early years, we were charting a course to build a company who would disrupt the incumbents who were pretty stagnant for 30 years. Back at the time, good companies built by the engineers who invented the technology, but it didn’t reach anywhere from mass production. And at that time, MakerBot was like flying high. ⁓ but to me, you know, and I was coming from hardware and consumer electronics and all that kind of stuff. And I was like, this is okay, but it’s also built out of plywood. So that’s not a real product. You know, the Maker, original MakerBots, if you remember.
And, there was this kind of false promise now in retrospect and there’s like a movie about this stuff called Print the Legend that tells the stories, the story of Formlabs and MakerBot and other companies. And I think we wanted to build the product for us, for professional engineers who routinely designed and iterated and do it in a technology called stereolithography, which is like the kind of the golden standard in terms of accuracy, surface finishes, material landscape, et cetera. And we did that and there was a very famous Kickstarter that was ⁓ for a long time the largest one that went from zero to three million pretty quickly. And it generated interest that forced the company to mature super fast and validated at least like a potential product market fit. You still had to kind of build the thing that it performs, which was very tough.
Yeah, and we were, you we did the whole thing, like raising money around this to taking it to market, to scaling it through now, I think, four five generations, depending how you count. building, I think, a world-class company that is product-driven and engineering-driven with acute attention to what customers are telling us, selling more than 150,000 machines more than all the professional 3D printing market combined from the beginning of time. So that gives us a perspective on this market and super proud of it, super proud of the team and it was awesome.
Keith Cline (32:23)
Wow.
Well,
like you highlighted, it’s a hard product to build. I talked, so Max was on the podcast before.
Natan Linder (32:39)
It’s also a harder company to build that is profitable. It’s a thing. While, I don’t know if you know, lot of the 3D printing companies that kind of our cohort now either went out of business or in the process of going out of business and the incumbents are also not doing so well, but Formlabs is growing and growing fast and scaling up and innovating in that.
Keith Cline (32:45)
Right. Yeah.
Natan Linder (33:08)
That’s not an easy thing to do at all as a company, not just the products themselves. So Max and the leadership team, they deserve a very serious kudos ⁓ for what they’ve built there.
Keith Cline (33:24)
It’s amazing to take a product that was $60,000 to now $3,500 is so difficult to do, but raising funding for a company. So you had the Kickstarter incredibly successful, probably one of the most, if not the most successful ever at a Kickstarter. But when you were raising funding, there’s a story about a very famous legendary entrepreneur, founder, investor who overheard.
Natan Linder (33:49)
Yeah.
Keith Cline (33:54)
pitch at legal. So anyways, I just need you to tell that story.
Natan Linder (33:55)
Yeah.
That’s, so you’re talking about Mitch Kapor ⁓ who is by now a good friend and he’s very famous for starting ⁓ Lotus 1-2-3, so the first real commercial success of the spreadsheet. ⁓ I think his name is on the sidewalk in Kendall Square right next to it?
Keith Cline (34:03)
Correct.
It is,
Natan Linder (34:26)
One of the HPE folks, either Bill or the other guy, and Bill Gates. ⁓ And ⁓ David Cranor and Max were pitching and ⁓ he was tweaking, they were pitching someone else. And I think the joke was that David had kind of a loud voice and Mitch overheard them pitching. I almost want to say it was in Henrietta’s table when, as you know, everybody.
Keith Cline (34:56)
It might have been Legal Legal Seafoods because I think, yeah, yeah.
Natan Linder (34:56)
Everybody goes, it’s the legal seafood. Yeah, legal seafood. Sorry. Yeah,
Legal seafood. And Mitch tweeted like, sitting in legal seafood, overhearing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I think David tweeted at him back and said, ⁓ we’re doing this and that, interested? And then he came over. And that’s how the relationship started. ⁓ Then he came, visited the office and all that kind of stuff. And it was… ⁓
And there’s like a continuation of that story, how we redefined the elevator pitch. Have you ever heard that one?
Keith Cline (35:25)
And then…
You need to tell it. I love it. Yes, Max told it in episode 240 something, but I…
Natan Linder (35:34)
Do you know that story? he did? Okay, so I’ll try. I haven’t heard it, his version, so we’ll see. You’ll tell me if it tracks. So Mitch comes up to the office and it turns out, and we’re in industry lab, which was on Hampshire Street and Cambridge, and it’s nice brownstone, but it’s like really old, the system’s old. Elevator’s crappy, and we go down and loading dock elevator, and the elevator gets stuck. And this is after the pitch, or and turns out Mitch ⁓ doesn’t like tight confined spaces. And the three of us and Mitch are in the elevator. And then what happens is Max goes immediately to engineering mode trying to hack the elevator. And David is calling the building management to kind of see what’s happening. And I’m like talking to Mitch and kind of.
You know, trying to figure out smoothing it over and whatever. So he saw the whole team working and then somehow, I don’t remember exactly how we got out of the elevator. ⁓ We got it unstuck and ⁓ I think ⁓ he kind of said, okay, if that’s how you guys operate or something along those lines, I think we should kind of do this deal. Yeah, so how did I do that track with Max’s story?
Keith Cline (36:31)
smoothing it over.
It yes, it was very, very comparable. Yes, I mean, it just it’s one of those legendary stories where I’m like, that is such you can’t event it. You got Mitch Kapor trapped in an elevator. It’s like you’re going to invest in us or we’re not going to going to be able to get out of here. So so. But I mean, ultimately, mean, you know, fast forward to today and, you know, raised if my numbers are correct, over two hundred and fifty million dollars over multiple rounds.
Natan Linder (37:02)
You
Yeah, yeah.
Keith Cline (37:24)
Unicorn plus valuation and this elegant piece of hardware and what it does in it. ⁓ it’s crazy. And just this like everywhere I go, you see these now. It’s like, you know, it’s it’s amazing just to see how.
Natan Linder (37:30)
Pieces, multiple product lines, big and small.
Yes.
It’s a required tool for people who design products of all kinds in any industry and for people who manufacture to produce the tooling to make the things. But it also is, ⁓ you know, more and more applications that go into end use parts, for example, in dental or medical device ⁓ spaces where, you know, where you need like a certain material properties are, ⁓ you know, built to order parts that fit you exactly, whether it’s a dental guard or a piece of, you know, orthopedics equipment to, you know, to help you do your PT or, you know, your cast or things along those lines. And it’s, ⁓ honestly, it’s just the beginning because, you know, the technology is getting better and it’s getting more… well understood and everything you see around you wherever you know let’s look at the room you’re sitting in like most of the physical things products you use the chair this and that like some point in their life cycle went through 3d printing
Keith Cline (38:55)
Yeah, no, it’s an amazing company.
Natan Linder (38:56)
That’s how we design stuff today and also how we manufacture stuff.
Keith Cline (39:32)
All right, so what led you down the path of the next company now? So on to Tulip.
Natan Linder (39:38)
So I of gave you some of the background, you know, growing up with the physical stuff and like all my career, know, between building mobile phones or robots or…3D printing, I was always in production environments. One of the things that was always interesting to me and then became some sort of an obsession is that I’m building all these high-tech products and then the labs and the design, I have perfect tools and I can build digital pipelines and create processes and all these kind of things. Then you go to the production environment and you’re in paper.
That was true 10 years ago. It’s still kind of true today. And so back in 08, I started seeing more and more of that when Rod told me go visit factories to figure out how to train robots. And it started a process like thinking about this idea in general. I was doing research under Pattie at the Media Lab and working with now my very long-time ⁓ partner and co-founder ⁓ Tulip Rony Kubat.
And he was in another group, we were hanging out and he was coming over and I was very intrigued with his work, applied machine learning and computer vision research. He was into startups, he was in Bluefin at the time. I had a group of undergrads that were working with me and some of them are here. For example, ⁓ Mason Glidden, was ⁓ an undergrad researcher at MIT, now Tulip’s, was Tulip’s second engineer.
He’s our chief product and engineering officer and Matt Aldrich who runs engineering here ⁓ did his PhD and a bunch of others like folks that ⁓ over the years helped to build Tulip were kind of hanging out at the Media Lab and ⁓ these themes came through various aspects of our research. There’s kind of a disconnect between operational environments and the information systems that drive them. It came through a project that at the Media Lab we call Luminar, that was kind of a projector sensor system that had the ability to create application in that domain to kind of project information on a physical object and augment it. And obviously you can use that to do guidance for operations. So a lot of companies, industrial companies who sponsor the Media Lab like Steelcase, Lockheed Martin and the like, but also education companies like Pearson and got really interested and saw the application in that. to make people use that, you had to have no code, low code, and stuff like that. ⁓ that was like kind of a genesis of, hey, there’s something here that is enabling this new type of operational interfaces to be born without someone needing to know software or complex concepts like computer vision and AI and so on. This is before AI was cool again, you know?
Keith Cline (42:47)
Right?
Natan Linder (42:49)
And at some point, building this and doing another project with a sponsor, another one, was this moment where we’re like, there’s probably a company here. And the company was set up to build those human-centric, provided tools to the people who actually do the work in these operational environment, be it a lab, a warehouse, assembly floor, what have you. And those people are generally speaking, industrial process engineers, could be doing different jobs from operational excellence, lean quality, ⁓ industrial process design controls. There’s like so many engineers that they’re not software engineers or electrical engineers that ⁓ kind of really matter in this, ⁓ and they had no first class tools. And they have bosses and they live in organization. And those organizations, they really need one thing productivity. And that’s a collective term like for all the plagues of operations, like they’re all chasing higher yields and lower cost of poor quality and faster time to train and faster NPI, which stands for new product introduction cycles. Because human society in general, what it does, it’s like we use technology to build things that ensure our survival. It’s our medicine and our and it’s our security and our mobility and our compute and our entertainment and it’s like all manufacturing, you know, we need manufacturing otherwise back to the caves So there’s no caves available anymore ⁓ So we need to manufacture and we need to do it in in in a pace and cost curves that feet fit the global supply chain and the economies we live in and we don’t have more people. So you got to make more productivity and technology helps so that – that’s kind of the origin story of Tulip and why we built the company and working very hard to scale it up and ⁓ it’s kind of an exciting moment, as they say. ⁓
Keith Cline (44:56)
Yeah, mean, but in the early days, I’m sure it was challenging because manufacturing lots of opportunity for innovation, but it’s not necessarily the industry that people think of that is first to market on innovation. So how did you get the early adopters?
Natan Linder (45:05)
Yeah.
They’re like the black sheep bastard child of the technology stack. It actually comes like, if you think about operations manufacturing, they’re trained to save cents on the dollar and the bill of materials. So like investing in anything that you add costs to operation is really difficult. And also they were working often under the auspice of the, you the Benoveland CIO who would ⁓ come down from the Olympus of, I’m obviously exaggerating it for dramatic purposes, but would go down and say, thou shall use this system, thou shall use that system that I’ve so wisely chosen for you. And they’re all like, fuck you. We’re not gonna use this system. ⁓ Your system sucks. We’re gonna use our system. Johnny built this and there’s three spreadsheets that is better than your crap. And by the way,
Keith Cline (45:59)
Right?
Yeah.
Natan Linder (46:08)
XYZ legacy vendor that will not be named here failed again and their system integrator failed again and ⁓ that’s it. And then the CIO gets fired and the CEO goes, ⁓ man, we need digital transformation because it’s time to go to the cloud. I know for some of our audience here, they forgot that there was cloud and all that kind of stuff and now we’re just talking AI but not too long ago like even going to the cloud it was like not obvious for operations.
Keith Cline (46:43)
Right. So how did you get to the point where this industry was, okay, this is ⁓ highly useful. It’s saving us time and value and everything you had to get to, to where it’s…
Natan Linder (46:57)
The number one thing that I don’t think is too representing special, it’s like any B2B meaningful and scalable technology, software otherwise, you have to build it very close to the customer. You can’t kind of build in a bunker, come out and say, hey, do you like crap I built for you? And then say, no, it’s like, what is this thing? So we were with a customer in day one, and building this thing in design partnership very close to customers and making decisions how to scale to a platform because the bar for what’s a real platform versus the marketing term platform, because everything is a platform as you know, everything is a platform. But for us, I’m really talking about the technical definition of a platform and ours is very specific. It’s high availability, AI first, no code, low code application development platform that…
Keith Cline (47:35)
Yeah, websites are platforms now.
Natan Linder (47:56)
has an edge stack, has an ecosystem and a library that supports the drivers of all the things you can connect and the content, meaning procedures for whatever use case from production visibility, work instruction, quality, audits, training, you name it, across multiple verticals. So we work in general industrial goods, companies like Generac and Stanley Black and Decker through luxury good, like companies like Tiffany and Cartier, all the way to medical device, Bickton Dickinson and Johnson & Johnson 13 of the large pharmaceutical companies are Tulip customers. How did that happen? It’s a platform because it spans the verticals and it’s had distribution that is over the internet. It’s shocking for industrial, most of our industry is still working on SaaSifying their business, which is ridiculous because right now needs to stop SaaSifying it and going to AI.
It’s like their business transformation has like now, you know, two steps there. ⁓ So we were like, this is how we’re gonna do this. And like we made a lot of conscious choices to do that. And it was always clear that it’s gonna be a long journey because this company does, our industry, and as a result, this company, it cannot follow the hype because the customers are non tolerant to stuff that do not work.
Keith Cline (49:25)
And that’s a great, great point, following the hype. Because then you build something that’s too far out that they’re not ready for and you don’t survive because people won’t buy it. It’s like early to market, right? There’s so many founders that are like, great idea, just early to market, right?
Natan Linder (49:43)
I was just talking to Tom about how, like, with the exception of deciding not to build projection sensor systems, which was a great non-dilutive way to fund the company, which we like, we never pivoted.
There’s stuff we, I don’t know, did a better job or worse job building. Or mistakes, so many mistakes along the way. But, you know, can, really proud, we have like this tulip manifest thing like from more than a decade ago and it just says all those things, you know, that we’re gonna build. And why we’re building them. And I think it still stands today, pretty much. It’s just like, takes a long time to build.
Good companies.
Keith Cline (50:31)
What would be an example, just like I know there’s so many use cases, so it’s hard to talk fluid about all of them, but one example of a customer would use your platform to do, what would be a good example?
Natan Linder (50:46)
The most common one is we are considered the next generation composable architecture for a breed of software called manufacturing execution systems. No one agrees what a manufacturing execution system is. There’s no standard for it, okay? But by and large, this is a piece of software that typically sits ⁓ in the middle, kind of northbound is your ERP and supply chain planning.
And southbound, there could be other production systems and manufacturing equipment, like it could be the machines you use or the automation setups you’ve introduced, which create a lot of data. And it has interfaces to the humans who live in those production environments. And so Tulip is the orchestration layer. We call this frontline operation platform. And the use cases are many. It’s…
production visibility, so what are we producing now and collecting all the data, creating the reports hooking up the machines and giving you monitoring and overall equipment effectiveness. It is auditing and quality, so the ability to see what people are producing, get the critical measurement. It is ⁓ documenting it, so in regulated industries in particular, and we talk about ⁓ pharmaceuticals, a medical device, and aerospace defense, the notions of electronic batch record in the case of ⁓ drug making or electronic device history records if you’re making anything that flies ⁓ or goes into a thing that flies, ⁓ a medical device that goes into an operating room, think a catheter, like has that kind of documentation. And that’s by law, that’s required. You can’t produce otherwise, ⁓ or sell it otherwise, I guess. ⁓ yeah, and I think people use it to train their workforce, they’re using it in general to ⁓ perform this thing called operational excellence. It might be a term you’ve kind of heard from a perspective of lean manufacturing. sure it’s a term you’ve heard before. ⁓ really what it is, if you generalize it, we help companies rewire how they work and have a modern digital first AI based production system.
Keith Cline (52:57)
Sure.
Natan Linder (53:09)
And the term production system, which is very abstract, but it’s like, it’s a term that encompasses the, you know, your manufacturing technology, your supply chain, your people, so the team that does that, your facilities, and gives you way to continuously transform that and improve that, which is another important principle of lean, because these environments are not static. They keep changing. Factories are shut down because of demand, and so you need to move production lines. New products are born, so you need to start a new production line. Supply chain change, so you need to cut in engineering changes. You have a quality issue. Some employer moved into town, your attrition went up 10%. You need to hire and train fast. I can go on and on, but you get the idea. This is why these, a lot of people think that stuff they get in Walmart or wherever just come from like this.
Keith Cline (53:58)
Right. Yeah.
Natan Linder (54:06)
giant black box machine that you just press the button and get as many wallets it to sell you but it doesn’t it really doesn’t it’s like supply chain and manufacturing is complex so that’s the thing that Tulip is doing and it’s like it’s just helping we think that I guess where we started with physical ads and now more than ever it’s like the industrial software stack is
Keith Cline (54:19)
It is, it’s crazy. ⁓
Natan Linder (54:34)
massively getting reconfigured right now. Legacy, know, on-prem systems are no longer tolerated. ⁓ You know, you have to, and that’s our view, not everyone has to agree. If you can’t invest enough in the people actually doing the work because they’re actually so scarce. That’s the domain expertise, the knowledge of how to get something done. And that’s… you know, it’s really humbling to see what people are doing with our stuff, because while we started manufacturing, like you see Tulip now in the warehouse or in labs and other places, and it’s just like where people do frontline work that is not, so to speak, knowledge work, which is one of the most arrogant terms. I think knowledge work and knowledge workers is kind of like the blue collar, white collar of our century or our decades because as soon as you use it, you almost define who’s not doing knowledge work. If you say this person is doing knowledge work, it means that potentially another person is not. And in operation, it’s very pronounced and very problematic because we don’t have enough humans. We just don’t. And whether we like it or not, if we don’t have strong manufacturing operation, you don’t have a strong economy. It’s very simple. And that’s why I think, you know, as a mission, like a greater mission, you know, of Tulip to kind of make sure we have a productive or wherever in the free world, there is a need for a productive workforce and we’re global, you know, we’re in Boston and in Munich and in Budapest and in Tel Aviv and in Singapore and in Tokyo and we also have operations in Shanghai.
Why a small company from Boston has that? Because supply chain is global. It’s not because like we like traveling, you know It’s because we serve enterprise multinationals and like they care about their factory in Thailand as much as they care about their factory in ⁓ Europe or in Wisconsin and and so Yeah, so you got a you got to cater to you know companies that suffer from this productivity crisis and ends up with people so if we can help build better, more productive production system that are centered people. We help everyone, the companies and the economies they live in. And that’s the reason to wake up in the morning.
Keith Cline (57:11)
All right, so Tulip, you recently announced $120 million series D round of funding at a $1.3 billion valuation. So there’s a lot going on at Tulip. So what’s next? Like what’s next for the company?
Natan Linder (57:17)
Yeah.
We’ve been working with Mitsubishi Electric and for folks who are unaware Mitsubishi is one of the big five automation players on the planet. It’s a 150,000 person company. It makes mobility, so railway, makes escalators and HVACs. It has factory automation division. It has an aerospace division that makes things like radars. So it’s like super diverse for large scale global discrete manufacturer. A lot of the company’s business, while very global, is centered in APAC and in Japan, naturally. And ⁓ we had a thesis on working globally. I just kind of mentioned it, you know? And it kind of comes with deciding to build an enterprise business, which is also, I think, a little bit unique in the story of Tulip that, because a lot of companies, know, in B2B start mid-market and go up. We started at enterprise for better or worse. ⁓ the thesis was that we cannot overlook Asia-Pacific. And I think a lot of Westerners are very arrogant as it comes to thinking about APAC, especially when it comes to operations the past several decades. I think that’s changing because no one is ⁓ in my circles that I think are know their stuff is unaware of ⁓ China’s dominance in production and hardware. And that didn’t happen overnight, but the past few decades, more factories, more automation, more scale, and more knowledge as a result in what happens in the whole life cycle of a product. I’m talking product design to full-fledged mass production of stuff. Think about companies. mean, they have…BYD and they have DJI and they have Huawei and like huge massive companies. It’s also the other country on the planet that actually have at scale ⁓ massive internet cloud service providers like Alibaba and Baidu and Tencent and the like and ⁓ of course they have their own huge organic market But and you can extend that to AI as well into the research so So, you know the arrogance of the West is first of all needs to stop because the West will continue to lose. It’s like very simple. Because a lot of it is people talk about like, we winning? And I think the discussion should be is like, how we should stop losing, so to speak, or how to coexist and if you want a positive spin on it to feel better on a Friday morning. But really what it is, like, it’s just the supply chain have changed. And so this arrogance is about like, oh, you go to APAC because you want to get better rates or cheaper labor cost, whatever. That’s arbitrage. Or you want a bigger market for your great product. And that’s so wrong because you need to go to APAC because it’s such an organic market and you need to fit your products there and you need to work locally. And you actually need to build some stuff there ⁓ to be truly part of the ecosystem. And to do that, you need partners.
And so we in Japan, especially, know, Japan, we just had a great event in Japan, March 6, where we launched ⁓ the partnership and celebrated, you know, we set up an office there and also translated ⁓ the Augmented Lean book. And ⁓ so now it’s in Japanese and it’s where production system, you know, the concept of Kaizen, Gemba walks, Pokayokes, all those things were born, popularized and then augmented and kind of shipped all over the planet to, you know, to this stuff we commonly known as Agile Scrum and Six Sigma and all these sort of ⁓ concepts in modern operation that without it, you basically are not competitive anymore. And Japan, you know, Japan really needs it because Japan obviously has like many countries in the region like think Korea, Taiwan, negative birth rate. They need people. ⁓ They’re very industrialized, so always like fourth and fifth place like you know, have US, China, and then Germany, Japan, India. And I think Japan and India now are just kind of, because of dynamic the past few years, tons of investors going to India, so it’s kind of from volumes are changing. But from innovation, tradition, all that kind of stuff, Japan, I don’t need to tell you and they’ve been suffering. Sony and Sharp lost the business of TVs to LG and Samsung and semiconductors and memories evaporated. ⁓ But they’re still going strong. Toyota is still the most important automotive company on the planet and ⁓ there’s tons of tradition there and so it’s just Tulip has a very natural fit there.
And we’ve been working with DMG MORI, who’s one of our earlier investors as well. So we were there already. it’s just like ⁓ such a privilege to work with a huge company that wants the same thing. And even though the asymmetry, you know, because they are many, like look at our cap table, like we have Stanley Black & Decker, DMG MORI and Mitsubishi. So there’s some pattern there. So it’s not like a fluke.
You know, it’s like we are attracted to work with companies that want to solve the same problem that we see. And when they see it and we see it, it just becomes very natural. So we’re scaling up in the region and Japan in particular, building a team, much larger team there. But it’s also in general, a scale up moment for the company, which is extremely validating for our approach, both from an architectural perspective, ⁓ the work we’re doing ⁓ with AI and it just spells growth, because we’re at that stage of the company. So, expecting the company to grow. We’re hiring in Boston. We have a lot of open jobs. We would love to, if people are excited about the themes that we’re talking about here, come build Tulip. We work in person. This might be a turn off for people, but that’s okay. Some people like it, so these three days a week show up in the office and work with real people, even with all the AI and the Zooms and whatnot. We care about that. ⁓ Yeah, it’s small team distributed. I don’t know, that kind of stuff. You know, no assholes. What else?
Keith Cline (1:04:28)
Like what’s it like working there? Like why join Tulip now?
Natan Linder (1:04:36)
Why join Tulip now? I think very few companies and we did not time this, you know, it’s just kind of happened. Get to experience this AI Gutenberg revolution moment with the moment they’re scaling up, you know, and having ⁓ quite a phenomenal ⁓ set of clients, basically the largest companies on the planet, ⁓ really excited about ⁓ working together and realizing sort of the next evolution of the platform, and it’s obviously built on a decade of very meticulous work with them. that growth is also, I’d say, like natural momentum, no AI wash induced here. But it would be really almost like putting the blinds on, not ignoring that, and to get to build because you know we kind of talked about my early career experiences like I I was there when smartphones were born you know when I joined Samsung they had like 400 variants of operating systems you know and and the ARM chips didn’t compile C++ so it was like I think there’s something here and it was like super exciting to be part of it and know, Rich Miner from Android came to visit here one, like the other day. And Rich, and it was funny because like I only met Rich ⁓ in person like when I moved in here, you know, to Cambridge. And of course I knew about him and all that, but it was like, I was on the other side in Samsung, like testing this new thing called Android that, what is Google doing exactly with this thing and blah, blah. And so,
Keith Cline (1:06:13)
I was just thinking about Rich.
Natan Linder (1:06:39)
You know, I think there’s like kind of this moment in industrial and I don’t know, I’m hearing like all these like knowledge work are not safe anymore. So if you want to build something in the physical world that is complex workflow, that is highly regulated, that goes into real industrial businesses that are not going anywhere, you know, I think Tulip is a kind of an interesting place to do that if you’re excited about it for the right reasons, you know, so.
Keith Cline (1:07:09)
check out their job listings because it’s an extraordinary company and yes, they’re hiring aggressively. So, well, Natan, I do want to thank you for taking the time to walk us through your background story. Obviously all the great work that you’ve been involved with and all the teams at Forum Labs and Tulip and obviously all the great stories and advice.
Natan Linder (1:07:22)
Thank you.
Absolutely. the last thought I’ll leave you with is, you know, anyone who would listen to us the past decade, we tried to explain that kind of Boston is the epicenter of, you know, advanced manufacturing technologies, which is I had another rant on that, by the way, because a lot of a lot of people, you know, we were talking about hiring in Boston, all that kind of stuff right now. But, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, is Boston losing its team and blah, blah. And it’s like, shut up, you know.
Just shut up. I mean, working on hard problems is not going away and we have the best schools and we have great ⁓ large scale companies in Massachusetts across all verticals that build products that are really hard and it’s in different domains. It’s like it’s from CAD to robotics to…
Keith Cline (1:07:58)
⁓ It’s so true.
Natan Linder (1:08:25)
medical devices and biotech and obviously advanced manufacturing technologies and additive and all that kind of stuff. And they’re not slowing down. There’s like a Formlabs mafia. There’s like a Tulip mafia. Yeah.
Keith Cline (1:08:38)
Which is amazing. I remember seeing a post on LinkedIn where I was like, wow, look at all these companies that are born out of Formlabs.
Natan Linder (1:08:42)
Yes.
Yes. Yeah. And Tulip. And I don’t think that’s slowing down. And like it’s so defeating like to my God what’s happening in New York and what’s happening in Valley. We don’t care. You know we should care about the work that’s being done here. The people in the Commonwealth and listen to what Eric Paley is saying and just get to work. Like Boston. That’s what we do. We work and we build important things. And that is extremely valuable if we continue doing that and not just chase the next whatever shiny hype.
Keith Cline (1:09:19)
Boston’s very humble and that’s a trait that I admire, but I don’t think people do recognize all the great things that are happening with the Formlabs and Tulips and I could go on and on and on, like celebrate. Yes, well it is and that’s why I started this podcast, yes. Yeah, that’s what I do. All right, with that said, that’s all, thanks so much for taking us through your background story and all the great advice and great companies that you’re building and yeah.
Natan Linder (1:09:26)
Yeah. Keith, Keith, that’s your job. That’s your job. You know, that’s what you need to do. You need to go, okay, then it’s very clear what we need to do here. okay. All right.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
