Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Drura Parrish, President of Xometry (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do engineers and designers find you or how do you find engineers and designers to bring on to your platform?

Drura Parrish: Mostly through traditional channels. We really care about our customers, but we’re out talking a lot. This is something that all of us at Xometry deeply believe in. We want to help speed up innovation, centers of profitability, growth, and entrepreneurship, and increase employment.

From an organic approach, we’re talking to our partners daily. We’re out talking to our customers daily in whatever capacity we can. Every place that you can imagine that somebody cares about manufacturing can be, we try to be there.

Sramana Mitra: I love what you’re doing, by the way. What do you see in your orbit of open problems that you would like other entrepreneurs tackle where you see something that’s unsolved and unaddressed? What would you recommend some new entrepreneur looking for a problem to solve to go out and take that on?

Drura Parrish: I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life. We’re looking at one of the largest problems. We still haven’t figured out a true and easy way to spin up a new company. We spend so much time on the uniqueness of the problem and the solution but not focusing on the necessary super simplified infrastructural moves.

What I mean by that is if you’re ever gonna scale on a product-based business, you’re going to have Salesforce or Hubspot systems. But why in the world aren’t these things easier? Why aren’t these things more consolidated? Why isn’t there a way to use Xometry to spin up a manufacturing supply chain the same way that we use AWS to spin up a server? It’s still really hard to spin up a company. Everybody’s been talking about this since the dawn of time.

Sramana Mitra: What are you talking about spinning off a company? You’re talking about starting a company? Getting a company off the ground? Spinning off has a different connotation.

Drura Parrish: Not spinning off, spinning up. All your receivables, payables, and all your fulfillment needs. I am talking about having everything in just one easy-to-use $9.4 trillion piece of software to help you have a baseline operational system for a company selling anything.

A while back, there was this marketplace concept where you could go start a marketplace online. It’s just solving the infrastructural needs. In particular, we have a huge set of problems that we’re getting ready to move into, which is all about manufacturing producing an enormous amount of data.

There is no real systematic logic across different machine makers to make them easy to truly scale and automate the more important things. I always joke that there’s a great opportunity in boring things.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, absolutely. This is something that we firmly believe in. There’re lots of boring workflows that need digitization and automation. There are lots of businesses to be made in all of those boring areas.

Drura Parrish: I always joke that larger ERP and financial companies take years to make billions of dollars in transactions. I need to pay you something and make it more convoluted for everybody to do that. That problem exists in manufacturing at an enormous scale.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Drura Parrish, President of Xometry
1 2 3 4 5 6