I run OSS Ventures, the leading venture builder specialized in software for manufacturing. Our business model is launching and building software companies, and then being an investment firm, re-investing and investing in the companies to get a paycheck when the company is big and beautiful and mature.
An investor asked me if I was going to Slush, the famous annual tech big party in some cold european region. I said no — I’ll be in Turkey, inside the largest factory of its kind in the region. I’m supposed to be an investor. Should I go to Slush ? Why cannot we “just be normal” ?
When his email arrived, I was standing in a century-old plant in Providence, Rhode Island.
The contrast felt like a metaphor.
This week, in that same factory, two PhDs in AI and a former Databricks engineer spent their days shoulder-to-shoulder with three manufacturing professionals with 25 years of experience each — one of whom postponed her retirement to help deploy the first large-scale AI system in the company she’d spent her life in.
That’s what “contact” means. It’s, in our world, the opposite of “distance”.
At OSS Ventures, our job isn’t to wire money and wait for outcomes. It’s to stand where the problem actually lives. Our job is to run alongside the founders in the idea maze , guided by the manufacturing professionnals. We believe that the real insight — the kind that creates lasting, ethical companies — doesn’t come from reports or conferences. It comes from contact: physical, intellectual, and moral proximity with the world we’re trying to change. And when you have it, you know. Capital will follow the execution on this, inevitably.
1. The Ethos of Contact
To understand an industry, you have to share its temperature. Factories don’t reveal their secrets in slide decks or vibe chatting with ChatGPT— they reveal them in the sound of machines, in the rhythm of operators, in the invisible constraints that make a system tick.
Most investors operate at a distance: capital first, insight later. The initial dance from the founder to try and seduce the investors is something of a strange ritual. The correlation between founder being good at selling their vision and actual insight is far from 1.00 . So proxies are used : three reference calls, personal experience of the founder and closeness to the subject. Oh, and you’re supposed to answer in 10 days if the deal is hot. This is a very hard game to play, and one we decided not to play.
Builders, by contrast, operate in reverse: insight first, capital later.
That inversion — from abstract capital to embodied experience — is what defines our ethos. We created 18 of our 22 portfolio companies. We partner with founders for a 12 week probation period before starting the companies, acknowledging that we don’t know what a good founder is and choose to partner with unconventional founders.
Contact is not just about “being there.” It’s about humility. The courage to start, and try, and fail, with a large contact surface with reality. When you stand next to a technician who’s kept a production line running for two decades, you realize how little you know — and how fragile most “digital transformations” look when they hit reality. That humility is the root of ethical technology building. It prevents arrogance, and it breeds precision. Everybody has a plan, until the 2AM shift has an issue with a 250K machine. Just look at a sales pitch from one of your founders, and spend one day in a factory with her. You’ll get informations no due diligence can provide.
2. Where Value Actually Lives
The industry world doesn’t need more pitch decks nor people pontificating in HQs about digital. It needs better translations — bridges between two systems of truth: the digital and the physical.
To translate between code and craft, between the language of throughput and the language of latency, the only way we’ve found is being present. Between what the spreadsheet says and what the operator and machine actually do at 3 a.m.
Every OSS company starts the same way: dozens of hours on the shop floor.
We build with, not for. Because technology in manufacturing is not a “layer” you add — it’s a nervous system you connect into an existing organism. And the only way to do that without hurting it is through contact.
3. Ethical Proximity, and distance
There’s an ethical dimension to contact. We live in an era of remote conviction — where opinions scale faster than actions, and distance has become a feature, not a bug.
But ethical creation — the kind that leaves behind value, not debris — requires presence. You cannot fix an ecosystem you don’t inhabit. You cannot claim to empower workers you’ve never met. There is no “AI for manufacturing” without understanding what a shift looks like, what a line stoppage feels like, what responsibility means when it’s embodied, not abstract.
Contact, therefore, isn’t just a methodology. It’s a form of respect. It speeds up success and failures alike.
Maintaining an healthy distance at times to pause and reflect and actually innovate is, counter-intuitively, as important. But the optimal ratio we’ve found so far is something like 90/10 : 90% of the time in factory, 10% thinking in an office.
4. The Builder’s Responsibility
As builders and investors, our responsibility is to narrow the distance between capital and craft. To refuse the lazy comfort of abstraction. To be the ones who show up — at 5 a.m., in steel-toed boots, next to founders and operators who are inventing the future while keeping the present alive.
That’s how you discover the right problems. That’s how you earn the right to build. Most of our founders get insane conversion numbers in their early conversations after creating their first product. Some of our co-investors marvel at the depth of knowledge they get to on a particular issue.
It’s because they lived through the issue and the solution alike.
5. On top of the rest, builders have to speak up
Especially since manufacturing (re-)became such a hot topic, the amount of noise from people very far from the subject is insane.
It’s very hard for builders to maintain an edge in communication when so many people are trying to get a piece of the mindshare of everyone and focusing only on making noise. Builders are, by definition, busy building. Talkers make a living out of, well, talking.
My deep belief, as Jobs said, is that the best thinkers are doers. It doesn’t mean that all builders are good thinkers — one of the many reasons it’s so hard to be a founder. So it’s also the responsibility of the builders to be deep thinkers and spread the word around and win the communication battle, grounding the discussion in ambition and “what-if” but also from a place of actually operating.
I think that’s a huge issue in the West — builders don’t get the respect they deserve. Especially in Europe. Let’s change that, it’s our responsibility.
6. Closing Thought
Somewhere between the noise of a humming machine in Providence and the precision of an AI model in Istanbul lies the future of technology: one that touches the real world instead of commenting on it. Our work — as builders, investors, and citizens — is to stay close enough to feel the heat, step back far enough sometimes to think clearly, and then spread the word.
It’s a difficult balance and an ethics that asks for immense involvement — but that’s the way to go and reindustrialize the West.
That’s what it means to operate on contact. I’m so proud of the teams doing it all day at OSS Ventures and portfolio companies.
Let’s build.