Stepping into CEO

I am very excited to announce that as of mid-December, I have stepped into the CEO role here at KittyCAD. Jordan has done a fantastic job of leading the company as CEO thus far and will step into the role of Executive Chairmain. Jordan will still be responsible for financing and corporate development. He is not going anywhere!

Most of what I have spent my time on, previous to the role of CEO, has been building out our server and API infrastructure. It has been super fun developing the base that will scale with KittyCAD as we grow (which is in great hands with Adam Sunderland, thank you Adam!). Now that it is in place, I can spend my time focusing on the bigger picture, ensuring product-market fit, working directly with customers, recruiting amazing engineers, and (I'm sure) on occasion still burning the midnight oil coding an idea or fixing a bug.

I am very excited to steer KittyCAD into its next phase as a company. I am constantly surrounded by hardware products that have changed my life. From my very first computer I bought myself, a Gateway that came in the infamous cow box to the computer I am typing this on (with an M1 chip, go Apple), my 3D printers, my phone, and many many others. I want to live in a world where creating hardware products is faster and easier than ever before and I know KittyCAD will play a very large role in that. After co-founding Oxide and seeing firsthand how painstakingly difficult it is to build hardware products, I have a newfound appreciation for all the products I depend on.

We have a bunch of ambitious and hard features we are working on releasing this year and we are hiring for various positions. We are building our graphics engine, automating the most mundane parts of mechanical engineers' workflows, creating our own file format¹, and leveraging generative AI for mechanical design. If you are interested in any of these areas, please apply! We are looking for engineers who, like us, get energized and driven by building things that have never been done before.

We hope to enable the next generation of companies building tools for hardware engineers. If you are a company building in the area of PLM, robotics, machinery, and/or manufacturing and need graphics/CAD integrations for your product: please reach out to product [at] zoo.dev, we want to talk to you and make building your product easier. If you are an engineer working on hardware products, hoping to automate some of your mechanical engineering workflows, please reach out as well! We are always working on gaining more insight into how we can help the industry.

At KittyCAD, our mission is to make building hardware products as seamless as software. Having spent most of my time as a software engineer, we are privileged to have a world of tools at our disposal. Software engineers, imagine if your code editor, compiler, and runtime relied on a single thread and your CI system didn't exist -- welcome to the world of hardware engineering. The hardware world has been left behind, but luckily that is changing with a new wave of startups and tools that are working to solve this. We seek to empower the next generation of hardware tooling with a modern set of paradigms they can build on top of. Our hope is that in a few years building hardware won't be so hard².

Footnotes

1. Before you think we are that XKCD joke, we are working with industry incumbents to extend an existing format ;) ↩

2. Sorry not sorry for the dad joke. ↩