Paperless Parts was founded with a mission to drive innovation by making manufacturing more accessible.
Jason Ray, Co-Founder & CEO, shares the details on Paperless Parts and what it’s like to work there.
In this Video
We discuss:
- Details about Paperless Parts and what they do
- Use cases / Customer Examples
- The Paperless Parts founding story
- The culture at Paperless Parts
- Why Paperless Parts should be on your radar
Video Transcript
Keith Cline: Jason, thanks so much for joining us.
Jason Ray: Oh, it’s great to be here, Keith. Thank you. I’m excited to talk to you.
Keith Cline: Because we’re going to talk about Paperless Parts, which is the leading intelligence platform for the industrial supply chain. So let’s talk about Paperless Parts. What does the company do?
Jason Ray: Yeah, thank you so much. So let’s… I think to understand what we do, you got to understand where we’ve been. So 10 years ago, we started this company, and we focused on how do we speed up the pace of innovation in the industrial supply chain. Mainly, it came back to understanding that, by and large, the US industrial base is run by brute force—really awesome people working really hard using antiquated software. And all of that manifests in the estimating process being really slow.
It was really… it was weird to find this niche. You know, you look at it and it’s like, well, there’s problems all over the place, but all those problems boiled up, and the nexus of all that was estimating. So 10 years ago, we set out and we said, “We’re going to remove this bottleneck. We’re going to make it so that the estimating process in contract manufacturers and job shops is fast, it’s consistent, and we eliminate the risk that these folks are taking as they evaluate hundreds to thousands of unique designs every week, every month.” So we said, “Let’s go solve that problem.” And in solving that problem, we will learn an enormous amount about the US industrial base, we should see innovation speed up quite a bit, and we’ll continue to figure out how we improve connectivity across the industrial supply chain.
So now, fast forward 10 years, we have this mission at Paperless Parts, and it’s to connect the nodes of the industrial supply chain. Because we find that a lot of the problems that were manifesting in the quoting process were actually a product of accidents happening at the intersections in the supply chain. This is one of my favorite phrases: “accidents happen at intersections.” Right? It’s like… it’s such a simple phrase, but it’s true for everything in every business. The intersections is where you should look for the problems—the handoffs, the data being shared between teams. The supply chain is no different. So as you move from an OEM—a Boeing to a GE—to a tier 2 supplier, tier three supplier, down all the way down to the raw materials, files get saved off, they get repackaged, they get split apart, they get shared. And that activity of handoffs that manifest in the estimating process, that is the… that is the messiest part of the industrial base.
And so our goal is to build connectivity, and by building connectivity, it’ll be more secure and make it so that these interactions up and down the supply chain happen a heck of a lot more seamlessly. So usually when we talk about this, people don’t believe that this is a problem. They’re like, “There’s no way. Like, you’re telling me someone’s printing out, you know, a 2D drawing of a part that goes on my airplane, and then they use white-out or use sticky notes to redact it, and then they scan it back in, and then they send it to one of their suppliers, and that’s how American manufacturing works?” It’s an… it’s a little bit of an extreme case, but I’ve literally seen that process happen, and it’s… it’s very antiquated. So, um, we’re going to fix that.
Keith Cline: So so how does it work? Meaning, uh, who’s the end customer? And because it sounds like there’s multiple parties involved using your software, so how… so what’s the typical customer experience like?
Jason Ray: It’s all to all tiers of the industrial supply chain—from the smallest contract manufacturers making individual widgets that go into assemblies, that go into bigger assemblies, that go into airplanes and medical devices and rockets and you name it, all the way up to the companies that are designing and building the rockets. And so that allows us to have maximum impact because our customers interact with each other through our product.
Keith Cline: Complex problem, one that maybe people weren’t paying attention to. So so how… what’s the founding story? How’d you come across this idea?
Jason Ray: Yeah, it’s interesting because each of the three founders approached the problem from a different angle. So I was in the military, and I was in a supply chain role, and I was trying to buy parts both for a legacy platform—I was on a wooden ship, a minesweeper, and 30 years old, supply chain had gone cold, hard to buy the parts. And then I went to Naval Sea Systems Command and I was buying missiles—so brand new platform, trying to source and get quotes from 2,000 suppliers so we could get the thing on contract, and that was brutal and it took forever. And so that’s the angle that I saw it from.
My co-founder Scott Sawyer, he’s our chief scientist, um, he was the… you know, he’s the technical brains of the company. Scott was running a hardware startup and they needed to buy hardware, and they couldn’t buy it in the United States, and they couldn’t get it prototyped quickly. And so when push came to shove, they had to bet the company on injection molded tooling, and the bet didn’t pay off. And it made building startups in hardware very scary and very risky. And so that like… that alone slows down innovation. Like, if I can’t start a business tomorrow and I can’t prototype things and I can’t buy small production runs and test the market, I basically have to go out on a lot of risk, I have to raise a lot of money, and I have to really hope I’m right. And so that’s the angle that he saw it from. He was like, “My gosh, I would have loved to have been able to work with suppliers in the US for this.” And instead, we had to go overseas.
And then my co-founder Jay Jacobs—Jay built Rapid, and Rapid was the world’s largest sheet metal prototype shop, second largest CNC machine prototype shop. And Jay had built a lot of novel software and solutions to the problems we solve at Paperless Parts, but he had done it at Rapid. And so Jay was really the… the catalyst that said, “You guys should go build a software company.” And I… I think… I think you’ve seen what the problems are, go fix it.
Keith Cline: All right. So a lot has evolved since that moment. What’s the latest at Paperless Parts?
Jason Ray: So we just had our user conference in Boston. Um, we had 300… a little over 300 of our customers come into Boston for it, which was a really nice showing. Um, it grows every single year, so it gets bigger and bigger each year. We’ve had it four years in a row now. Um, we are launching new functionality, as are all software companies, and it’s AI. So we have to say it a bunch of times so, you know, our stock price will go up and people will think the company’s super valuable.
Um, but all kidding aside, we… we focus on highly domain-specific artificial intelligence technology that is very different than building a wrapper around a frontier model. I think a lot of companies sit on top of frontier models and they erode their gross margins, and they build businesses that may scale in revenue rapidly but don’t scale in profitability because of how they’re designed. We took a very different approach. The manufacturing industry is not one where you call up all of your customers and say, “Hey, we’re going to pass on some token costs to you, okay?” That… it doesn’t work that way. These are long-term contracts. These are people that like predictability around revenue, and they’re demanding customers that want the latest and greatest technology.
So we spent a lot of time building highly scalable, highly cost-effective models that allow our customers to interact with their designs—everything from the most modern design coming out of, you know, Creo, Catia, SolidWorks, all the way back to 1960s hand drawings. And we’ve been able to do that just because of the sheer amount of data and the sheer, um, number of customers that we work with. And we’ve taken these models and now we’ve built leading AI models around understanding technical data.
Keith Cline: So what’s it like working at Paperless Parts? What’s the culture like?
Jason Ray: You know, I got the best compliment I’ve ever been given, um, at this user conference, and I think this… this may sum it up. Uh, one of our customers, who I hadn’t… hadn’t met yet, walked up to me and he… he’s like, “Yeah, nice to meet you.” He’s like, “You must be a good guy.” And I was like, “Okay.” I was like, “Well, thanks.” I was like, “What makes you think that?” And he’s like, “I think good people only work for really good people. If… if they… if they don’t, then they would leave.” And he’s like, “I’ve interacted with so many members of your team, and they’re just such good people. They’re nice, they care, they’re communicative, they’re responsive, they really want me to be successful, and I can just make the assumption that you’re a good guy because I don’t think people like this would stick around if you weren’t.”
And I think that… that sums up the culture pretty nicely. Like, that’s not me, per se. Like, I’m not, you know… it’s not, “Oh, because Jason’s a good guy, we have a lot of good people that work here.” I think we just have a culture of really good people. And… and I’m using that word intentionally because like, I think a lot of… a lot of founders and a lot of tech people will be like, “Oh, we got the best people in the world, they’re the smartest, you know, we hire only out of these organizations.” We… we hire good people that care. They want to do a good job, they put a lot of effort in, they take time to get to know our customers.
Really early in our company, we said a key piece of our culture is that relationships matter. So a while ago, I wrote a letter to our board that said, you know, “AI is happening, amazing, and we are going to be paperless, not peopleless.” Because the manufacturing industry is built on relationships, and it’s built on understanding that there’s another human that really cares about your business and is working to make that successful. And that’s what we do. We lean really heavy into putting our arms around our customers, and it leads to phenomenal outcomes, right? But it’s… it’s… that’s the first step. You know, like, our… we have best-in-class retention of our customers. They stay with us, they expand with us, um, and it’s because everyone is focused on the goals that they want to achieve.
So I hope that answers the question. We have a lot of fun, too. Um, we spend a lot of time in the office, mainly because we want to. Um, people are always doing things together. Um, what else about our culture? Um, I think that… I think that kind of sums it up, but definitely a lot of teamwork. If you like working with a team to solve problems, you’ll definitely like working here.
Keith Cline: Now, top-tier talent, regardless of market conditions, they always have options for them and their career. So why should Paperless Parts be on someone’s radar?
Jason Ray: Because you can feel the impact of what you are doing. I think… I think there’s a spectrum of feeling impact. The one end of the spectrum is you get a paycheck, and that is a representation of the impact you make on the company that you are working for, and that is like really far from feeling the impact. On the opposite end of the spectrum is you get to walk around a user conference where your customers walk up to you and thank you because their businesses are more successful, they can spend more time with their kids going to their soccer games on the weekends, they… they look at it like, “I’m going to be able to hand my business off to my children,” or, “I’m actually going to be able to sell my business someday, and that’s changed my entire life.” Like, I don’t think there are very many businesses where the people writing the code and the people doing the work are that connected to the customer base and the outcomes the customer base is having.
It is also incredibly tangible. So, Paperless Parts—the products that are getting quoted through our software, and it’s about 50,000 a week right now—those products go into everything. So when you think about seeing Artemis launch, you can quite literally sit here and say, “Our customers quoted the parts that are on Artemis that launched.” Like, that’s a direct connection. You can see it instantly. When you look at, like, new medical devices coming out, you look at, like, autonomous vehicles driving around, it’s crazy. Like, it’s real tangible impact that you can then also like… you imagine when people ask you, “What do you do?” Like, “So, what do you do?” You have to try to explain, like, “I do martech, and I help companies advertise, and they… they like us, but I don’t know any of our customers by name, and I’ve never talked to any of them.” Or you could say, “Well, you know, do you see that recent launch that went up? Yeah, our customers made a lot of the parts that went on that, and they won those parts because they were able to quote them through Paperless Parts.” And that’s just… it just… it’s freaking cool. It just is.
So that’s… I think that’s why top-tier tech talent chooses to come here, because they… they get tired of working on software for software companies for… that are making more software for other software companies. It’s just like that… that… that grind of no tangible impact gets old fast. It’s like, what do you want to be able to tell your kids you did? Like, “I sped up the US industrial supply chain,” or, “I made it so that ads show up more effectively and people buy a bunch of random BS on their social media accounts.” Like, what do you want to be able to say? Like, life is short. So that’s… uh, that’s my rant.
Keith Cline: Well, if you are interested in exploring opportunities at Paperless Parts, you need to go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their job listings there. Go to venturefizz.com/paperlessparts and you’ll see their jobs. Jason, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the details on the company.
Jason Ray: Yeah, thanks, Keith. Really appreciate it.