Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Drura Parrish, President of Xometry (Part 6)

Drura Parrish: In manufacturing, margins are spread across a lot of players. In between all those players, there’re different collection fees at every point. On one hand for manufacturing, you’ve got systems for both data and protocols and machines. On the other hand, you have financial systems that still aren’t concrete.

Manufacturing is not necessarily moving at the speed of the web. But it needs to be updated very quickly. That’s your lowest common denominator – can it accept payment at the same speed than your most advance system does.

The problem is between your most advanced manufacturing systems. There’s a huge gulf to cross. But the problem is, those people indirectly interact every day because the supply chain is a lot smaller than people think it is. Communications and communication tools specific for B2B are not bloated, not crazy, and not hard.

One of my favorite statistics is from five years ago. 50% of all invoices were either mailed or faxed in manufacturing. This problem has been covered a lot. We got a long way to go. So, other opportunities for entrepreneurs that people are solving problems now specifically in manufacturing is training.

We still haven’t found a good way to train the next generation of manufacturing employees. That goes back to understanding what those systems of the future of operations are going to be. There’s got to be a lot of robotics. It’s not necessarily just machining.

If manufacturing had a super congress and they could all meet and the leaders of tomorrow could just sit down and say, “What do we need to do?” One can say, “We’ve got to use Xometry more.” The second thing they would say is, “We just need to invest in simple infrastructural moves so that we can scale.”

Because outside of the platform that we’re building and the methodologies we’re trying to follow, it’s just hard to scale the global manufacturing platform in its current state.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. What are the fundamentals of your company? Are you a bootstrapped company? A venture-funded company? How have you built this company? How long have you been around?

Drura Parrish: We’ve been around since 2003 or 2004. I came in as part of a merger acquisition in July by another company – MakeTime. We’re a venture-backed company. We’ve raised over $60 million according to Crunchbase.

We’ve got investors from Foundry Group, Highland Capital, BMW, and GE. So, we’ve been very fortunate to have a great blend of strategic and some of the greatest thinkers in venture capital today.

Sramana Mitra: The company is headquartered in Kentucky, is it?

Drura Parrish: No, it’s headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland. It’s right outside of DC. We have offices in Bethesda and Lexington.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. I really enjoyed listening to you. What you’re doing is very exciting. It’s a different era for American manufacturing and hopefully it’s going to be an interesting next decade or two decades in American manufacturing.

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