#321 - Max Fischer, CEO of Deltia - on building for business scale.

Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to solve the most challenging productivity challenge in Manufacturing: human action. My guest is Max Fischer, Founder and CEO of Deltia.

Max is a mechanical engineer. In 2014 he was a founding member of HackZurich, the largest hackathon Switzerland has ever seen.

In 2015 he co-founded Actyx and digitized 40+ factories. In this startup, he led product management, sales, and marketing teams.

Meanwhile he has established himself as a thought leader in the space of digital transformation for the factory floor.

In November 2022, Max founded Deltia, a startup focused on helping factory operators track, analyze and improve efficiency by identifying the best possible processes and assisting workers with digital tools.

Their mission: to make human work in manufacturing more productive and less error-prone by taking out the guesswork.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Max to my podcast. We explore what's broken in identifying productivity opportunities in manufacturing. Max explains how for the first time ever - this is possible. He shares some of his big lessons on building the company, especially when it comes to foundational questions like "who's it for" and 'what's it for' - and how that helped them remain highly focused.

He elaborates on his first principes for building the platform - and how that helps them stay resilient and offer scalable solutions. .

Here's one of his quotes

There are a lot of decisions that you take both on the technical level and what customers you're serving. Who is the user that you're trying to focus on? We decided quite early on to not specifically target the Toyota's of this world. The automotive OEMs are basically the best-run manufacturing companies in the world. There are use cases, obviously, also for technology, no doubt about that. But I think a big opportunity is to help the 98% of other factories to come to a similar level to where Toyota of Volkswagen are today.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why functionality is important - but not as important as system design
2. How to go about building for business scalability rather than just technical scalability of your solution.
3. Why the dream is not to help Toyota or Volkswagen - but companies much smaller and weaker than those brands.
4. What they are doing differently to accelerate stakeholder buy-in from IT, legal, and Unions.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Max Fischer
• Website: Deltia

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