Manufacturing has long been the bottleneck between imagination and reality. From aerospace to automotive, complex physical products still take years to tool, validate, and produce. Machina Labs is working to change that equation by turning factories into flexible, software-driven systems that can build almost anything, anywhere.

Edward Mehr, co-founder and CEO of Machina Labs, joins Greg to unpack his journey from early software obsessions to SpaceX, and ultimately to founding a company focused on rethinking how the world makes metal parts. Drawing from hands-on experience across software, robotics, and aerospace manufacturing, Edward shares why factories themselves are the real product, and how breaking the link between tooling and design unlocks speed, resilience, and creativity.

The conversation explores how Machina Labs’ robotic “Robocraftsman” systems combine dexterity, AI-driven learning, and modular deployment to form metal without molds or dies. The result is manufacturing that adapts as fast as software, enabling rapid iteration, distributed production, and entirely new business models.

Highlights from the conversation include:

• Edward’s early fascination with computers and making things, and how hands-on craft and coding shaped his view of the physical and digital worlds
• Lessons from SpaceX on why manufacturing speed, not engineering ambition, is often the true constraint in hardware innovation
• Why traditional factories are locked to specific designs and materials, and how Machina Labs is building product-agnostic, software-defined factories
• The concept of the Robocraftsman, a robotic system that learns like a human craftsperson and adapts processes in real time using data and AI
• How Machina Labs captures data from both physical forming and simulation to train models that optimize force, tooling, and process parameters
• Early traction in aerospace and defense, including dramatically reducing lead times for legacy aircraft parts that once took years to replace
• Expanding into automotive manufacturing and enabling mass customization directly from OEMs without expensive tooling
• A major partnership in the UAE focused on rapidly deployable, distributed manufacturing for defense and commercial resilience
• The strategic importance of factories as national security assets in an era of fragile global supply chains
• How portable, containerized manufacturing systems open the door to off-world production on the Moon, Mars, and beyond
• The challenges of building multidisciplinary teams across robotics, AI, and materials science, and how leadership evolves as companies scale
• Edward’s vision for the future of manufacturing, where physical expression becomes as fast, personal, and iterative as software development

If you are building hardware, scaling robotics, or rethinking how physical products get made, this episode offers a deep look at what it takes to bring software-speed thinking into the world of atoms.

Learn more about Machina Labs: https://machinalabs.ai/

Machina Labs Advances Custom Automotive Manufacturing with AI and Robotics: https://machinalabs.ai/resources/machina-labs-advances-custom-automotive-manufacturing-with-ai-and-robotics

Strategic Development Fund Announces Investment and Initial Agreement with Machina Labs: https://machinalabs.ai/resources/uae-strategic-development-fund-announces-investment-and-initial-partnership-with-machina-labs

Connect with Edward Mehr on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edward-mehr/

Venture capital looks glamorous from the outside, but the reality is far more nuanced. From surviving market cycles to backing founders through years of uncertainty, long-term success in venture comes down to judgment, grit, and pattern recognition earned the hard way. Peter Harris, Partner at University Growth Fund, brings a rare perspective shaped by nearly two decades in venture investing, student-led fund models, and firsthand experience navigating both booms and downturns in technology markets .

Peter’s path into venture capital started early, influenced by entrepreneurship, real estate investing, and a shift from wanting to be an engineer to seeing business itself as a tool for solving problems at scale. After helping rebuild and operate one of the largest student-run venture funds in the country, he went on to co-found University Growth Fund, a diversified Series A and beyond firm with a mission that blends strong returns, student development, and economic impact.

The conversation spans what makes founders investable beyond pitch decks, why fundraising ability is often underestimated as a CEO skill, and how venture dynamics change when markets tighten. Peter also shares how AI is rapidly reshaping creation, distribution, and labor, and why ownership of assets may matter more than ever in the decade ahead.

Topics covered include:

• Peter’s journey from student venture investor to Partner at University Growth Fund and the lessons learned rebuilding a fund from the ground up
• How living through multiple market cycles changes how investors evaluate risk, founders, and timing
• Why a CEO’s ability to raise capital in both good and bad markets can determine a company’s survival
• The concept of grit in founders and why simply outlasting competitors can be a decisive advantage
• What Peter looks for beyond resumes including earned secrets, founder insight, and lived experience
• How University Growth Fund balances real venture execution with training the next generation of investors
• Why most businesses should not raise venture capital and the control trade-offs founders must accept if they do
• How AI is driving the cost of creation toward zero and shifting competitive advantage toward distribution, sales, and brand
• The implications of AI on labor markets and why asset ownership may become increasingly critical
• Common mistakes founders make when pitching VCs and how to think more clearly about what capital is actually needed for

For founders, operators, and anyone trying to understand how venture capital is evolving in an AI-driven world, this episode offers a grounded and experience-backed look at what really matters when building companies that last.

Connect with Peter Harris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vcpete/

Learn more about University Growth Fund: https://www.ugrowthfund.com/

Listen to Peter’s podcast, VC.fm: https://vc.fm/

Connect with Greg Toroosian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregtoroosian/

Robotics does not stall because the ideas are bad. It stalls because the underlying infrastructure is missing. Adrian Macneil, co founder and CEO of Foxglove, has spent his career inside the systems that power some of the most ambitious autonomous technologies in the world, and he believes the next leap in robotics will not come from a single breakthrough robot, but from making robotics development radically easier for everyone.

Adrian’s path spans early work in payments and crypto, a formative chapter at Coinbase, and several pivotal years at Cruise during the early rise of self driving cars. At Cruise, he saw firsthand how much bespoke infrastructure was required to build, debug, and scale autonomy and how every leading AV company was quietly reinventing the same internal tooling. That realization became the foundation for Foxglove: a data and visualization platform designed to give robotics teams the same off the shelf leverage that software startups take for granted.

In this conversation, Greg and Adrian unpack:

• Adrian’s journey from early programming curiosity to building infrastructure at Coinbase and Cruise, and why autonomous vehicles made the value of robotics instantly tangible
• Why robotics development is dominated by custom tooling, siloed data formats, and painful debugging workflows, and how that slows the entire industry
• The origin of Foxglove and its mission to provide a shared data platform for robotics and physical AI, from logging and visualization to debugging and analysis
• What makes robotics data fundamentally different, including multimodal sensors, massive data volumes, limited bandwidth, and edge-first constraints
• The creation of MCAP as an open data format, and why interoperability is a prerequisite for robotics to scale beyond a handful of well funded teams
• How Foxglove acts as a single pane of glass for understanding robot behavior across simulations, incidents, and real world deployments
• Why robotics startups face “death by a thousand paper cuts,” from hardware and autonomy to go to market, pricing, and reliability expectations
• Lessons from fundraising in a non consensus market, and why finding investors who already believe your thesis matters more than convincing skeptics
• The parallels between today’s humanoid robotics hype and the early days of self driving cars, including the long tail of real world deployment
• What Foxglove looks for when hiring, and why proactive ownership is the mindset Adrian would clone across the entire company
• A ten year vision where starting a robotics company feels more like starting a SaaS company, with off the shelf infrastructure enabling founders to focus on real customer problems

If you care about the future of robotics, autonomy, and physical AI, and want to understand what actually needs to change for the industry to scale, this episode is a grounded and deeply informed look at the infrastructure beneath the hype.

Learn more about Foxglove: https://foxglove.dev

Connect with Adrian Macneil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianmacneil

Connect with Greg Toroosian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregtoroosian