Podium Automation

After 5+ years of the most intense, challenging, and rewarding work, my time at Bowery Farming has come to an end as it unfortunately closed its doors. I’m so thankful to my mentors Scott Horoho, Colin Nelson, and J. Scott Mennen for the trust they placed in me; to have teammates in Vidya Neti, Stephen Bonk, PE, and Daniel Hallett who faced and conquered seemingly insurmountable challenges with kindness and relentless tenacity; to have had the privilege of leading Gregory DiLuzio, Theo Goodman, Matt Bruhn, Evan Hummer, Kiley (Markes) De La Rosa, Dan Halcomb, and Clinton Walker who always answered the call; and to have had cross-functional partners in Fahmina Ahmed, Cheyne Rocha-Rinere, Kyle Johnson, Kevin McNamee, Brent Askins, Chris Berberich, Amber Herzer, and Rodrigo Pereyra (plus many others) who challenged me intellectually and leveraged their subject matter expertise to build things together that none of us ever could have alone. I’m immensely proud of not only the farms we built, but also the culture and teamwork we embodied. In terms of what’s next, I’m excited to announce that a few months ago I teamed up with Jamie Niu to co-found Podium Automation. Throughout my career in industrial automation, the design and build process of control panels has been a consistent pain point I’ve experienced firsthand. I’ve encountered extended lead times as a customer, outdated business infrastructure, lack of a one-stop shop, and opaque explanations of design decisions and trade-offs. Like many who have experienced these problems, I’ve resorted to building panels in-house to meet a deadline and to avoid the endless back and forth required to outsource to a vendor. At Podium, we believe that the design and build of high-quality, low-cost custom panels should never be a gatekeeper of industrial equipment production & delivery; yet today, a custom panel can take anywhere between 2-6 months to design, build, test, and deliver post RFP award. We are taking a software-enabled approach to industrial control panel manufacturing that brings lead time down to days instead of months. As a UL listed 508A shop, we design for UL compliance from the start, and panels are built here in Brooklyn, NY. Podium’s vision is to create a new industrial supply chain to unblock critical hardware innovation across sectors and industries. Follow us on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date and reach out to me directly if you want to talk further!

Design ?? Build At Podium Automation, our goal is to design and build industrial control panels 10x faster than the industry standard. When I share this, one of the first questions I get is -- how? Today, most custom control panels are still built using a craftsman approach. An enclosure is brought to a work cell where a human will go through each step of fabrication sequentially (from cutting holes to mounting components to wiring) to produce a panel. Podium is taking a software-enabled approach to panel manufacturing in order to automate key labor constraints in the fabrication process. Our method doesn’t remove the human from the loop, but it does remove time-intensive and non value-add tasks like wire processing from the manual task list. If you've experienced long lead times for custom control panels and want to learn more, let's chat!

It's New York Climate Week! The AlleyCorp Deep Tech team has been out and about - Brannon Jones pictured below making magic happen thanks to Ryan Goethals and Metal Light Inc.'s demo of their wild energy storage tech. We had a ton of fun hosting an intimate founders breakfast alongside our friends at Transition - including their experts in climate and government grants. Topics covered included energy transition and storage, synthetic fuels, advanced manufacturing, construction and infrastructure automation, forest fire prevention, and climate adaptation. My optimism for the future stems in large part to the amazing folks I meet building solutions to the challenges we face, and the amazing investors backing them. Thanks to everyone participating in Climate Week, and working to make things better! Never been more inspired. ?? ?? -- Thanks again to Mona Alsubaei, Benjamin Ratz, Henry McLoughlin, and Kristian Branaes of Transition for co-hosting our breakfast. Thanks as well to attendees Andy Stulc of Renovate Robotics, Bill Clerico of Convective Capital, Ryan Goethals of Metal Light Inc., Jamie Niu of Podium Automation, Asmaa Alsubaei of Molten Industries, as well as Vikas Enti of Reframe Systems and Luke Winston - all awesome folks!