“Our Goal Is to Build an Electrical Engineer.” (Davide Asnaghi, Co-Founder & CEO of Diode)

Speaker A: We design circuit boards, which are the heart of every modern electronic product. This is what Diode is trying to do. Electronics was not a solved problem. Apple has clearly solved electronics at scale for production, but our prototyping cycles and the speed at which we could iterate was a fraction of what I was used to in Shenzhen. I will not trust somebody that tells me, oh, China can do it because the labor is cheap. That's not true anymore. They are incredible at automating things. We have to replicate that type of excellency here in the US.

When Amazon started making AWS, available to a ton of companies. Building became incredibly more democratized. This has not happened in the hardware world for many reasons, and I think that we need AWS for electronics. On AWS, you don't own the server, but you do own all the infrastructure. We want to be that for the printed circuit board industry in the United States. If you can bring the speed at which software companies move to the hardware world, in my opinion, we'll see a hardware renaissance. What we want to achieve as a company is to actually put beautiful copper in the hands of our to customers in the form of circuit boards.

Speaker B: Around the 2000s, the West outsourced a critical layer of the electronic stack to Asia: printed circuit boards. These copper and fiberglass planes the size of postage cards may not attract the same attention as silicon, but they are essential to create any kind of electronics product. Speaker C: From a phone to a drone to a humanoid robot. Speaker B: Davide Asnaghi is trying to bring that layer back to America. He's the co-founder and CEO of DIODE, a Brooklyn-based startup using AI to design and manufacture circuit boards in the United States.