Aaron Slodov is the founder and CEO of Atomic Industries, a company using AI to digitize and modernize manufacturing skills, and co-founder of Reindustrialize, a movement to rebuild American industrial capacity. The episode explores the crisis of lost manufacturing knowledge in the U.S., the challenges of reindustrialization, and how technology and entrepreneurship can help close the gap.
The crisis of lost manufacturing knowledge
The U.S. has lost critical industrial knowhow over the past 20–30 years as skilled tradespeople retired and knowledge was offshored or evaporated.
A striking example: in 2019, the Air Force posted a public RFQ on SAM.gov to rebuild tooling for a B-2 bomber component because the original designers were gone, the drawings were lost, and no one knew how to make it anymore.
The B-2 costs $2 billion, yet the U.S. literally forgot how to produce a part for it.
This illustrates a broader problem: even if blueprints exist, the experiential, tribal knowledge of how to actually manufacture things has disappeared.
This isn’t just a defense problem. Trades like plumbing and electricians are now in such short supply that contractors can earn $500K+ in places like California, showing how far the skill base has eroded.
How Atomic Industries started
Aaron tried to manufacture a product himself and was shocked by how dependent it was on wizard-like tradespeople with hard-to-find skills.
He spent a year (2019–2020) researching American manufacturing by calling around 200 shops across the country, posing as a Stanford business student doing a project on vanishing trades.
Nearly everyone was eager to talk, suggesting most of these shops had never been asked about their work before.
This research revealed a massive gap between high-level industry reports and the reality on the ground.
He incorporated Atomic in December 2019, betting that COVID would expose global supply chain fragility—which it did, making “supply chain” a household term.
The core thesis: digitize and augment tribal manufacturing knowledge with software and AI, not to replace tradespeople but to evolve the trade for the 21st century, since there isn’t time to train hundreds of thousands of people the traditional way.
Reindustrialize: smashing people into a room
Aaron co-founded Reindustrialize after having the same conversation about reindustrialization hundreds of times with people across military, finance, tech, manufacturing, and government.
The idea: bring all these stakeholders into one room to align on what reindustrialization actually means, who’s building, who’s financing, and what the future looks like.
He bought Reindustrialize.com for ~$5,000 and just went for it.
He frames reindustrialization as a generational opportunity requiring endurance and alignment across many groups—not something that can happen overnight or be solved by one person.
What Aaron would do as dictator of America
His top priority would be aligning incentives across every level: defense, government, finance, investors, founders, and shop-floor manufacturers.
Defense would come first (e.g., drones), but even there, standing up domestic supply chains for millions of drones requires electronics, chips, motors, magnets—none of which can be built overnight.
On the commercial side, he’d use tax policy and capital incentives to redirect investment toward manufacturing.
He notes that even in China, only ~4% of the industrial base is highly modernized, and ~35% has adopted leading-edge technology—so the problem of modernization is universal.
Realistically, reindustrialization takes 10–20 years; there’s no 2–3 year fix unless it’s wartime, and even then the knowledge base isn’t there.
Manufacturing startup financing
Manufacturing startups can’t be financed like software startups. Software growth metrics don’t translate directly, and there are very few examples of software-defined manufacturing companies built at scale.
Companies like Tesla and SpaceX are good models—their production lines are software-oriented from first principles—but they’re rare.
The challenge: transforming legacy industrial businesses requires massive upfront capital for vertical integration, and venture capital alone isn’t well-suited for this.
Aaron argues that venture should derisk the R&D to prove the technology flywheel works, then hand off to crossover funds (like those that invested in later-stage SpaceX) for scaling.
But most venture funds are too risk-averse and concentrated—often just 5 companies in a billion-dollar fund—leading to a crisis of creativity in VC.
He criticizes the tendency to pour hundreds of millions into late-stage software companies (e.g., Stripe at $100B, DataBricks) as “pissing money away” compared to funding hard tech and manufacturing.
Startup opportunities in manufacturing
Aaron frequently tweets that starting a manufacturing company is the path to becoming a billionaire over the next decade.
His framework for identifying opportunities:
Look for multi-billion dollar manufacturing verticals with stagnant, legacy operations.
Find where market inefficiencies are extreme or value chains have been fragmented (e.g., half offshored).
Develop technology that can collapse process, labor, or engineering to create a flywheel effect.
If the technology can change the physics of the problem, that’s a 10x opportunity.
He suggests people literally search NAICS codes for manufacturing processes, do deep research, and stack-rank by priority.
Examples he mentions: mining, energy, window manufacturing—any big TAM with room for automation and vertical integration.
Constraints on growth
The biggest constraints on Atomic’s growth are engineering and capital.
He’s cautious about raising massive infrastructure capital without the technology to grow into it efficiently.
He contrasts the venture route with the private equity route: PE can provide capital but often has misaligned incentives (e.g., not trying to build the next Tesla).
His ideal path: use venture to build and derisk the technology, then transition to crossover funds for scaling, eventually IPO.
Working on hard things
Aaron is driven by the process and challenge itself, not material outcomes.
He believes in doing the hardest thing imaginable with limited time, and thinks people should ask themselves what version of the future they want to build.
He admires Elon Musk not as an unattainable god but as someone who earned his position over 30 years through relentless execution, starting from humble beginnings (e.g., sitting in Netscape’s lobby too afraid to ask for a job).
The key traits he looks for in people: adaptability, resourcefulness, and agency—the ability to hack systems and build anything regardless of resources.
He argues that most success and wealth distribution is somewhat random, and that the government is the inverse of great allocators like Musk or Bezos: politicians are given enormous resource-allocation power without having earned it through building things.
Most painful thing in the past year
Aaron’s dog needed major surgery, and he has no one to help care for him, so he has to drag the dog everywhere, limiting his ability to travel and work freely.
The first surgery failed, and a second one is scheduled for early August.
He’s doing “omnidirectional praying” to make sure this one works.
