How Manufacturers can Guarantee Revenue Streams with Dave Evans

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, Fictive. Since its founding in 2013, Fictiv has manufactured more than 18 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 devel