The established rubric on scaling technology companies – designed and perfected in Silicon Valley – works well for software businesses shaping entirely new markets. But transforming legacy industries with physical technology is an execution problem distinct in its difficulty. The skill sets, capital strategies, organizational structures, timelines, and cultural orientation required to develop and deploy complex industrial-grade systems represent a fundamental departure from the “shared playbooks” used to build enterprise software and consumer internet companies over the past 20 years. In this presentation, we will focus on industrial business systems, why they matter, and how companies (and builders) can design for industrial scale from the early days of a product or company’s life.
