The following interview is a conversation we had with Michael Corr, CEO of Duro Labs, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $4 Million Raised to Power the Future of Hardware Engineering.

Michael Corr
Yeah, thanks for having me, Brett.

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building there, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?

Michael Corr
Yeah, happy to. So I’m actually electrical engineer, and I’ve been designing manufacturing products for well over 20 years, everything from telecom equipment to IoT devices, drones, wearables, ebikes, you name it. Quite a rich history of manufacturing. I was in the Bay Area for about 15 years. I actually moved to Hong Kong for a few years, had my own business helping companies get up and running in Shenzhen, and then eventually found my way to Los Angeles.

Brett
And what was it about electrical engineering early on that made you decide to. 

 
Michael Corr
Dedicate your career to that? To be honest, it kind of happens then. So I actually started out in college studying physics, which eventually turned into computer science, which eventually turned into engineering, and then electrical engineering, CS. So I think what it was I ultimately just, like, building things, and I love the challenge of software. And so embedded Systems was really that nice mix of all those curiosities. Let me really explore those ideas. Nice. That’s awesome.

Brett
And two questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a founder. First one is, what CEO, founder do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?

Michael Corr
That’s a great question. I’ve actually been pondering that for a bit. I don’t know if there’s a single CEO in favor with, but I do appreciate a lot of the peers that I’m starting to see in our industry, fellow founders that have found the same problems that I did and are coming up with their own ideas on how to solve it in complementary or supplementary ways. And so it’s just been really inspiring talking to them, kind of realizing that they’ve been living parallel lives I have over the last 1015 years, either in other cities or even other countries in the world. And we all kind of found our way to the same point, trying to really help the hardware community build products faster and more efficiently.

Brett
And is that a pretty niche community? Is there a lot of focus on people who are building hardware because at least from my perspective it seems like all of that attention, all of the focus is really on people who build software. But I could just be not understanding that ecosystem very much.

Michael Corr
No, you’re actually quite correct and it’s actually kind of a little vindicating that we’re finally getting some attention. So a high level the hardware industry has actually been pretty stagnant for the last 20 years in terms of innovation and new models for designing and manufacturing products. It’s been leveraging a lot of the same workflows and software tools and data models that were established in the never really evolved. And so again, having a background in computer science and having lived in the Bay Area in the mid two thousand s and being first hand exposed to what I refer to as that whole software agile renaissance movement, I just had an extreme jealousy about how much innovation was happening in that industry and none of that was really transferring over to hardware industry. And so it’s a little vindicating and inspiring, more importantly, to see that the hardware industry is finally getting some of that love.

Michael Corr
And we’re starting to finally see not only investments with some brand new ideas, there’s new software. Tools, there’s new software workflows, new data models, and we’re really going to see our own renaissance in the next two to three years, in my opinion. 

 

Brett
And why do you think that shift is happening now? And why was that the situation in general? Why did all the attention go to software? Just because it’s easier to scale or what caused that shift in the first place? 

 
Michael Corr
Yeah, no, excellent question. So this is my perspective, this is how I see a little bit of the history of the industry. So in the I’d say there’s probably about equal distribution of innovation and interest by young engineers in the software and hardware industries. About a healthy amount of young engineers were studying both. But I credit the.com really to pulling have a higher gravitational pull towards software development and much more interest and excitement around that industry and eventually that whole agile boom even exacerbated it. And so there was a big lull of interest of young engineers to study electrical, mechanical engineering and so as a result, the hardware industry kind of stayed stagnant. There wasn’t any new blood, newer generation, new cultural expectations. And so the hardware industry just kind of tracked the existing population, the existing workforce and the tools and processes they had grown up with. 

 
Michael Corr
And then following the whole software explosion of the web, it was mobile and so it just kept compounding. And so there’s a good 1015 year period where there was a larger number of young engineers who are more interested in software than hardware. However, that’s starting to change. It started to change about five years ago with people starting to recognize that hey, there’s more value of joining a hardware product and a software product and offering them as a complete solution. The term IoT was used quite a bit to kind of define that mix of a hardware product and a web or mobile product. And so those walls that were once there where you were either a software company or a hardware company have come down and now it’s kind of a combination. Companies are coming to market with a combination of software and hardware products together which in turn is inviting more engineers into the hardware space. 

Brett
That makes a lot of sense and that’s super useful context to better understand a follow up question to that. And let’s take Apple off the table because maybe that’s an easy one. But apart from Apple’s products is there a specific company you can think of that’s really just nailing hardware innovation right now? And when you touch their product you just think like wow, this is a masterpiece.

Michael Corr
Yeah, well, what I want to actually add to answer your question, also to add to the previous one, what’s also exciting is not just that companies are offering a more software, hardware complete solution. But you’re seeing that culturally. Some of the best hardware products are now being developed by software companies where not the Apples or the Samsung, but companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon who are originally software companies are now developing very impressive and very formidable hardware products. And so as a result you’re starting to see that software centric culture of workflows and agile workflows and git flow coming into the hardware space. And so that’s why these times are so exciting is because not only they’re younger and newer engineers in the hardware space but they’re bringing some of those best practices of software workflows and adopting them to how hardware is being built.

Michael Corr
And so as a result you’re seeing companies now to answer the second party question, you’re seeing other amazing companies besides the Apples, besides the traditional hardware companies that are doing incredible work and applying those software principles to building hardware.

Brett
So are we going to hit like a golden era sometime in the next couple of years where we’re just going to have some epic hardware and that’s coming out because I feel like it’s been a long time since I personally picked up something that’s not an iPhone and said, like, wow, this is an epic thing that has been built.

Michael Corr
Yes and here’s why. So one of the contributing factors to why software excelled so rapidly was because the agile movement allowed for rapid iterations and trials, creativity. The cost to fail, the cost to make a mistake was so low because you could try something with code, put it out there in the world, learn from it and then adopt in very rapid short cycles. And so as a result the cost to fail was low and so people were able to innovate. There was no penalty to try something new in the hardware space. Those similar kinds of feedback loops are possible, but the costs and times associated with are too high, that the cost to make a mistake is too prohibitive to take risks. And so what is starting to finally happen in the hardware industry is companies like Duro are finding ways to automate a lot of those traditionally manual processes, thereby shortening those timelines.

Michael Corr
You have innovation in production processes allowing for products to be manufactured much faster and much cheaper. And so those agile feedback loops are now starting to take root in the hardware industry because those costs and timelines are getting shorter and smaller and smaller. And so what’s going to happen, in the same way it did in the software space, is hardware companies are probably going to be able to innovate. They can be able to take risks because those costs to fail, those penalties of making mistakes, are going to come down significantly enough that it’s going to encourage people to try new things. And so once we kind of reach that pinnacle moment when hardware companies can move in a much faster and lower cost feedback loop agile cycle, that’s when the explosion of innovation is really going to happen in the industry. And you’re going to see some incredible new companies building incredible new products because they can in a much cheaper and much faster fashion.

Brett
And how does that make you feel? Are you just crying tears of joy as you look forward to this couple of years? 

Michael Corr
I am, yeah. And while I did spend 20 years in the trenches designing manufacturing products, and now as a co founder of a software company developing tools for those same people, I don’t get to be in the trenches as much as our customers. And so I do get a little jealous to kind of live vicariously through them. I still get excited when we go to visit our customer sites and we see the products they’re building on our platform in the labs and seeing all the test equipment and the machines and what have you. It’s nice to see. It’s really nice to see how much innovation is really happening in the space these days. 

Brett
Yeah, I can imagine. It’s a little bit off topic, but I just came across it recently and I watched it, I think, two weeks ago. Have you seen the documentary about General Magic? 

Michael Corr
No, I haven’t.

Brett
Have you heard of that company? 

 

Michael Corr
I don’t think so. 

Brett
I think how they described it is like the most important company that you’ve never heard of. And it was a hardware company in the mid ninety s, and they had invented the iPhone before the iPhone. It was part of the Mac team and it’s this beautiful story talking about their attempt to build something and their failure to do so and a very cool behind the scenes look at this company. So if you’re in hardware and in general you like documentaries, it’s a really good one.

Michael Corr
I’ll have to check it out.

Brett
Now, let’s talk a bit more about the product. So how does the platform work and what are some of those benefits that users get when they pay you and start using the platform? 

Michael Corr
Yeah, so Duro is following, we call ourselves a PLM product lifecycle management product. And that’s a product type that’s been around for a long time. But fundamentally, what we really are is a hardware data management platform. And so where data is users CAD files or build materials and supply chain data, and where we see where a lot of the innovation needs to happen is in the data entry process. So the hardware industry uses a suite of different tools managed by a handful of different teams to get your products from design to production. You have electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, you have operations procurement, you have manufacturing, you have logistics. And in the most common scenarios, each of those teams, most of them are not even on the same company umbrella, classic models. You have the designers, engineers in one company, manufacturers and vendors in another, if not across the world in Asia often. 

 
Michael Corr
And so as a result, you have all these different silos of teams managing their respective tasks of the data. They’re all handling the CAD files or bill materials in their own separate silo. And the software tools were built to follow that model. So plenty of incredibly powerful and capable CAD tools and PLM and ERP and a handful of other three layer acronym software, product categories. But none of them were ever designed to be interoperable. They were always designed to be individually operated and manually managed to move the data from one system to the other. And that’s been the fundamental problem of the industry, in my opinion, for the longest time. Basically because of the inefficiencies of these software tools, it required a whole secondary labor force just to manage those inefficiencies. So are there even a formal job titles of peoples whose responsibilities are to move the data from one team to the other and make sure transferred properly? 

 
Michael Corr
But that’s obviously very inefficient cost wise. Humans are prone to make mistakes or being inconsistent, and so those inefficiencies just keep compounding. And that’s my opinion why the hardware industry was always seen to be such a very expensive and risky endeavor because of all these inefficiencies. So this wasn’t novel, like a lot of people knew about this problem for a long time and a lot of people have tried to solve it. What I think is really why Duro is solving it correctly today is because not only is the technology much more mature and commoditized to be able to centralize the data in the same way that GitHub is centralizing software source code, but again, there’s a cultural shift. And so now there’s a new generation of engineers who fundamentally understand that model. It’s not foreign to them and so they’re not only embracing it, but they’re demanding it. 

 
Michael Corr
And so that’s really what Duro is doing, is we’re not only moving all this data to a centralized repository in the cloud, but we’re following agile software principles to be able to interact with the data and manipulate it. And we do that through leveraging a lot of data automation, data entry automation, data validation automation, and really taking the burden off the users for managing the data and letting software do that. That’s what software does best. Engineers are great at solving problems and designing and building great products. Software is great at managing data. 

Brett
And could you talk to us about the adoption that you’ve seen so far with the platform and any numbers that you can share? 

 
Michael Corr
Yeah, so we’re definitely getting a lot more recognition lately. We’re kind of only like a couple of chapters ahead of the history books where the culture is shifting. We’re seeing more and more hardware startups coming into the market every week wanting to follow these best practices. And so the addressable market is growing month over month as we continue to see investments in hardware and spin offs coming out of SpaceX and Apple and various others. And so Duro has just been at the right place at the right time, really gobbling up that market, that culture, those engineers who are looking for a solution like Duro. 

 
Brett
And in the early days, did you ever have doubts about what you were doing? I think I read online it was 2017 that you launched. So that sounds like that was very early on. Right now is kind of that sweet spot. So early on, did you have doubts of if this could be a viable business and a viable product?

Michael Corr
I did. Like any founder, you often question why are you doing this and what’s really for? Yeah, I think it’s a very stupid observation. We started 2017 because in my opinion, I kind of saw that the industry was starting to turn where more and more people like myself were trying to adopt software practices into how they’re building hardware. And so I thought it was the right time to start the company. I think in hindsight, maybe if I win year or two, there would have been a little bit more momentum in the market because early on that sizable market wasn’t there. It was still dominated by these legacy industry folks who were still trying to follow those old models. And I can’t tell you how many calls I had with prospective customers who were yelling at me that what were providing was not a true PLM, because we didn’t have these buttons or these processes that they had. 

Michael Corr
Been using for 30 years, even though they didn’t really stop to think and say, well, do those buttons really need to be there anymore? Do you really need to be doing these old processes? Technologies and workflows and data models have evolved, but some of the culture hadn’t. And so there was a period where I was concerned that maybe the market wasn’t as big as I thought it was and that maybe there were still too many people that were looking for the old workflows and the old data models. But we stuck in there and we continued to grow the company and invest in the product and the team. And now I can certainly say that there is no problem finding viable candidates to use our products. Nice. 

 
Brett
That must still get as the founder there for sticking through. That was, what, five years for that to happen? 

 
Michael Corr
Yeah, it was about four or five years before we started to see that momentum really picking up. Wow. 

Brett
How did you learn that level of perseverance and grit that’s required to see it through for five years? How did you develop that internal skill set and what did you do just to keep yourself sane? And some of those maybe, like, hard times that came up over that five year period? 

 
Michael Corr
That’s a loaded question. Well, the fundamental thing that kept me going is I really see the future and I see this, like, utopia of a much better place for hardware designers and engineers and manufacturers to get to. And I want to see it through. I want to get to that greener pasture. I want to get to that place where hardware can be designed and manufactured at much lower risk, much lower cost. And I have so many ideas of how duro can contribute to that future. And so that’s really what’s kept me going, is until we reach that point, I don’t want to stop. What’s helped me get through that is various things, certainly. I’ve got great teammates. I’ve got a great co founder, Connor. We built a fantastic team. The product customer base really inspired me. My family has always been there. My wife also is an entrepreneur herself. 

 
Michael Corr
And so we kind of commiserate and share notes of our own respective businesses. And it’s just nice find people just surround yourself with that, inspire you and help motivate you to keep going. 

 
Brett
Nice. I love that. Now, let’s talk a bit about market categories, and I know you touched on it there that PLM is where you land right now, but does PLM feel like home for you? Is this the category that you want to be in? Because it sounds like that’s where you’ve been placed, but it sounds like some of those features and capabilities that buyers are used to, you don’t offer and you don’t even view as relevant. So what are your views there when it comes to your market category?

Michael Corr
Yeah, that’s a great question. So kind of adding to some of the things we talked about earlier. When we first launched the product, we actually called ourselves Data Management Platform. But again, timing wasn’t right. And as I said, the market wasn’t ready for that concept. It was too much of the old school way of thinking. And so a lot of the prospective customers were trying to close did not even understand what that meant. They hadn’t heard that term before. And so we kind of retroactively said, so fine, we’re a PLM. And then immediately we started selling because customers got what were. And so PLM is in our mind, the cornerstone of this whole data ecosystem. However much work it takes, you are connecting a handful of different products. As I mentioned, the CAD, PBM, TLM, ERP, IMS, our industry is full of three letter acronym products, but that whole ecosystem of products is what I refer to as a garbage in, garbage out problem. 

 
Michael Corr
And so it doesn’t matter how powerful some of your reporting tools are, your ERP tools are. If the data going into the ecosystem is Erroneous or incomplete, then most certainly the data coming out isn’t going to be any better. And so we felt the place to start was at the data entry point. And that’s where PLM is. That’s the starting point. When you’re kind of starting to create your contact, where do you store it? You store it in PLM so we can solve that problem first, making it super simple, highly automated, and a lot of value at the data entry point. Then it makes it so much easier down the road to add more value at the other product category points. And so Duro has been super focused on becoming the best PLM in the market today. But from there are so many different ways we can go. 

Michael Corr
We can go into the production side, we can go into the toy management side, we can go into other areas. And again, because we are more of a platform, it can all be one ecosystem in and of itself. Always referring to that single source of truth. You don’t have to have these separate siloed products anymore. When you use Durham, you could just add on any of the modules that you need as your company, your product evolves. And it’s always pointing back to that same revision control system that we’re building on top of. 

 
Brett
And what’s that current PLM market landscape look like? Is there a big giant? Like, is there a sales force of this space that really dominates the market, or is it fragmented? What does that look like? 

Michael Corr
Yeah, I would say it’s a little bit more segmented and it’s kind of fine at different tiers. There’s certainly PLM systems across different product categories. We focus mostly on electromechanical hardware, but there are technically PLM systems for textiles, for food, for pharmaceuticals. We don’t really play in those industries. And then there’s other ways to segment it by the size of companies. So you have the SAPS, the PTCs, the Desos, who also have PLM systems that they’re much more complicated. These are multibillion dollar, multi year investments of just getting the infrastructure set up. Highly customized solutions which have a place when you’re a huge company with a very complicated product line but the majority of the market doesn’t need that. And in fact, I challenge you to ask many of the users of those systems if they even like it. And so we kind of play in another tier. 

Michael Corr
Where we do best is teams who are going through what’s referred to as NPI new product introduction. And that’s where teams are trying to move fast. They’re innovating, they’re trying to get out of their competitors, trying to get their own products to market faster and they want a proper way to manage their CAD bill materials and supply chain data. But a lot of these legacy products just are so complicated and formidable that they don’t like them or to be honest, they don’t even use them. They’ll just use spreadsheets or other types of data management processes which introduces a lot of risk and overhead. And so Duro does really well because we are so fast to set up and get running as well as operate. That that’s kind of been the niche that Durham’s focused on and it’s allowed us to transcend not just startups, but even large companies like even Apple goes through NPI, even Samsung or GoPro Google. 

Michael Corr
It’s just a common process that’s part of the lifecycle of a new product and that’s really where we do well and differentiate ourselves. 

Brett
That makes a lot of sense. And as I looked at your website, I see some really impressive logos. I see you guys are killing it on G Two. What’s the secret? How are you able to rise above the noise and really capture the attention and the trust of so many impressive logos? 

Michael Corr
Yeah, that’s a good question. Well, I’d say a lot of it has contribute to the fact that myself and my co founder Kellen are engineers. We’ve been in this space respectfully for 20 years each. We’ve lived through the pains, we know exactly what our customers are going through and in many cases we know more than they do. We can predict what problems are coming around the corner and we’ve been able to build a rapport with our customer base where they trust us and they know that we’ve seen these issues and that whatever we recommend or whatever we built in to our software is in their best interest. We’re not just salespeople just trying to get to our monthly quota, but we are generally interested in their success. And we spend quite a bit of time with each and every customer going through their current workflows, going through their partnering systems, revision schemes, their structure of their bonds and making constructive criticism, helping them do better, not just helping them get their systems into our platform because then it feels hypocritical. 

Michael Corr
As I mentioned earlier, it’s a garbage in, garbage out ecosystem and if we identify garbage data, we don’t want to promote that going into our platform. We want to help them clean that up to ensure a higher chance of success, of going to production on time and with little to no errors makes a lot of sense. 

Brett
Now, I’m sure in your journey you’ve encountered a couple of go to market challenges. If were to pick just one of those challenges that you faced and overcame, what would that challenge be and how do you overcome it?

Michael Corr
Yeah, I’m saying it’s one of the things that we have to grapple with and we knew this coming in, is we’re really at that crossroads of the cultural shift in the industry. You still have a large, sizable amount of customers who are used to the legacy workflows and products and a growing versioning industry that have no experience with those and are looking for the more agile, cloud hosted solutions. And so we have to be able to support both for a certain amount of time. And so while we wish we could only focus on this burgeoning market and gives us more flexibility and freedom to innovate, we still have to support some of the legacy customers. And so that’s one of the biggest challenges we have, is there’s many things in PLM that are very well done and really provide a lot of value. Not everything is inefficient or inappropriate, but there are many things that are.

Michael Corr
And so a lot of the challenges we have is going through each and every topic and saying, well, do we agree with the status quo on this particular feature or do we need to change it? And if we need to change it, do we just need to tweak it a little bit? Or is there a lot of room for innovation here for disruptive technologies or new ways of doing things? And so that’s been a tightrope that we’ve had to walk, is being able to really find that freedom and that flexibility to innovate at the same time being able to appease a lot of the legacy users. That makes a lot of sense.

Brett
Now let’s zoom out into the future. And this will be our last question since I know we’re up on time. So let’s zoom out five years from today. What does the company look like?

Michael Corr
Well, what I’m looking forward to is the day that a hardware team is stood up and the very first thing they do is install their dura account. So another analogy, the software industry is a software developer, even a mid level developer. They can set up their entire tool chain in an hour. They can set up their development environment, their GitHub, repo, Amazon web server, build server, what have you. All those tools were designed to be interoperable and work out of the box. They can continue to customize them to their heart’s content, they don’t have to. And so in about an hour they can have a full stack installed, configured and running and being able to push production code out to the world. What I’m. Looking forward to is the day that you can do the same thing in the hardware space. And setting up a revision repository in software is as simple as typing the words git init at your command line.

Michael Corr
I’m looking forward to the day where it’s the equivalent in the hardware space, where a mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, they install their CAD package before they create a new document. They go to the command line and they write the words Durham. That’s going to be the moment that I know that Duro has really made an impact on the industry. Nice.

Brett
That’s exciting. 

 
Michael Corr
I love it. 

Brett
Michael, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to go? 

 
Michael Corr
Yeah, you can definitely go to our website, www.getduro.com, and you can find lots of information about our product lines or our blog posts. A lot of videos about the product, other opportunities to learn more about Duro, the company.

Brett
Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your story and talk about what you’re building. This has been super exciting. I’ve learned a lot and wish you the best of luck in executing on this vision.

Michael Corr
Thanks a lot, Fred.

Brett
I really enjoyed it.

Michael Corr
All right, keep in touch. Our.