Flywheel Leadership · Graham Peelle (Managing Partner, Endeavor Strategic)

#81: Building the Future Factory with Renan Devillieres, OSS Ventures

·34 min·2 clips

Renan says founders need creativity and empathy, then asks: “Would you advise your daughter to take the job?”

1. Flywheel Leadership #81 centers on Renan Devillieres and OSS Ventures’ plan to build the future factory. 2. Renan Devillieres is the guest and OSS Ventures’ cofounder, and James is the host steering the conversation about systems and manufacturing. 3. The episode asks how OSS Ventures creates companies for operations, how AI changes factory work, and what leaders should do now. 4. Renan says OSS Ventures is a venture builder and investment fund that creates companies instead of only backing existing ones. 5. He says the firm has started 30 projects in five years, turned 22 into companies, and reached 3,800 factories and 200,000 users. 6. He says the team reviews about 100 ideas for each project because startup creation is expensive and hard. 7. He uses the “10X” rule and says a new project should be 10 times better than the alternative in research and development. 8. He separates project selection into “head” metrics and “heart” conviction, and says both are required before launch. 9. Renan says the most fulfilling part of the work is “making others succeed,” including factories, founders, and workers. 10. He gives the example of rural Tennessee workers on night shifts who can earn more when a job becomes more valuable. 11. He says “reshoring is actually incorrect” and prefers “new shoring” because U.S. factories cannot copy Thailand’s labor model. 12. He says COVID ended the old cheap-labor world and that the next three years could bring more factory and operational builds than the previous ten years combined. 13. He says the bottleneck for reshoring is “the speed of concrete,” and he points to manufacturing-contractor work as a strong business over the next three years. 14. He uses Tesla as a concrete example, saying one person in Austin, Shanghai, or Berlin can program 50 machines thanks to technology. 15. He says “60 to 80% productivity lifts” are already happening in non-direct labor positions, and he cites a Boston manufacturer that moved from 35 planners to 5. 16. He says the remaining planners are doing work that looks more like system management, data science, and coding than Excel administration. 17. The conversation is direct, practical, and system-focused, with James pressing for examples and Renan answering with numbers and operating details. 18. Renan repeatedly shifts from strategy to implementation, including his two-page values documents, his “way we work” document, and the question, “Would you advise your daughter to take the job?” 19. People interested in industrial AI, factory operations, and venture building would likely benefit from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting abstract leadership theory without manufacturing examples may skip it.

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