Founding
Why I started Antonym: There is no cloud for atoms
The $16.8 trillion physical economy never got its cloud computing layer. Between imagination and matter there is still no infrastructure, only hardcoded monolith megafactories, offshored capacity sitting a continent away from the need, supply chains so fragile a ship parked sideways can halt them, and years of waiting before the first real part exists. Everything expensive happens in that gap, and nobody owns it.
This is my log, not the company’s. I am writing it because I want a record of what I actually believed at the time, including the parts I get wrong.
The thing I kept hitting
Every serious manufacturing problem I worked on ended in the same place: someone holding a file that described a part perfectly, and a factory that could not tell them whether it could be made without a week of human phone calls.
I stopped finding that interesting and started finding it intolerable.
What I am not doing
I am not building a viewer. I am not building a marketplace. Both of those are easier, and both of them assume the hard part is somewhere else.
What I am doing
Putting the process engineer’s judgement into a system that can carry it, so intent and manufacturability are checked against each other before anyone spends material on the answer.
That is the whole bet. I will write down how it goes.