S5E10 Derek Pietz | Industrial Automation, Losing A Million Dollars, & Successful Startups

Being an Engineer

Derek Pietz shares his journey from engineering student to co-founding a successful automation startup and his current role leading engineering teams at Intuitive. He discusses the challenges of starting a company, lessons learned, and trends in the automation industry.

Main Topics:

• Engineering career path
• Founding and growing a startup
• Challenges and pivots
• Prioritizing work/life balance
• Designing robotic surgery equipment
• Improving team morale
• Communication best practices
• Future of AI and vision systems in automation

About the guest: Our guest today is Derek Pietz, the Director of Automation Equipment and Test Engineering at Intuitive, a trailblazing company at the forefront of robotic-assisted surgery. Prior to his role at Intuitive, Derek has been a part of four start-up ventures including one as a co-founder. He has built and led engineering and operations teams, designed machines, run a P/L, pitched investors, obsessed over supply chain, developed sales strategies, taught robots to make pizza and fixed customer problems.

Links:
Derek Pietz - LinkedIn
Intuitive website

About Being An Engineer

The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.

The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us

Chapters

1. Derek Pietz discusses his company receiving a letter that they owe their largest customer $1 million for a failed project (00:00:03)

2. Aaron Moncur introduces Derek Pietz and his background in engineering and startups (00:01:15)

3. Derek Pietz discusses co-founding an automation company called LTF and their early focus and pivots (00:06:15)

4. Derek Pietz shares an incredible story from one week at LTF around funding challenges, successes, and a potential investor (00:11:05)

5. Derek Pietz emphasizes the importance of having clear requirements in engineering projects (00:19:26)

6. Derek Pietz shares a success story turning around a struggling project team at his current company (00:28:00)

7. Derek Pietz discusses what brings him joy and frustration in his engineering role (00:34:35)