Our CEO, Saman Farid, recently joined the Forward Podcast to talk about a range of issues, including how U.S. manufacturing stacks up against China and Korea, the vast opportunities available for automation, Formic’s approach to unlocking robotization and fighting labor shortage, and building a $100 billion company.
According to Saman, there are 1.5 million unfilled manufacturing jobs in America today. On top of that, many of these factories have 200 or 300 percent labor turnover.
“Our goal for our customers is to become like a staffing agency the same way that today they say I need a few people to do X, Y, and Z tasks,” Farid says. “We want them to be able to call us and make the exact same request and we show up with a robot that does those things.”
Watch the entire video:
Listen to the audio-only: Forward Podcast
0:00 - Manufacturing in the US
4:15 - Why labor shortages
7:52 - Robotization in the US, China, and Korea
13:47 - Opportunity for the US manufacturing automation
19:08 - Formic’s hardware, software, and financing services
24:44 - Types of customers served by Formic
30:55 - Collaborative robots
33:15 - Case study: auto parts manufacturer
39:15 - Learnings from 10 years as a VC
46:56 - How to incubate a business
54:44 - People at Formic
1:02:12 - Future of robotization in manufacturing