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I think you’re actually asking good questions!

> scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh

OSH Park is fabulous for what they do, but they don’t do PCBA.

I’m not OP, but I think I can provide some insight anyway:

> Outside of targeting specific sectors e.g. defence, how else do you plan to remain competitive globally

I think that trying to be competitive globally would be a dumb play for these folks, they’re optimizing for something different.

Defence is one sector where this model works, no doubt. But there’s a bigger market that doesn’t have a great domestic story yet (I’m in Canada and work with a variety of CA and US PCB/PCBA houses): fast-turn low-volume PCBA, either for prototype iteration or for industrial one-offs. While I work on a specific “sort of defence adjacent” project right now, my past consulting work would’ve benefitted quite a bit from being able to turn around full PCBA work in 7 days. Macrofab end-to-end was usually 3-4 weeks and cutting that iteration time down would’ve had a solid effect on reducing project timelines if it could’ve happened for a reasonable price. There are domestic manufacturers who have optimized for that… but the price was not something my clients were willing to pay to accelerate their projects. If this hits a sweet spot there… that’ll be really exciting for me.

(I’ve already sent it to my team to start looking at)

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Defense adjacent work is another place where we're seeing some strong pull.

> scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh

Yes, OSH Park is awesome. They could add PCBA, but we see the long-term value in owning the full stack (from design to testing of finished boards). Stops us from having a knife fight all the way down.

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> I hate to ask this..but how exactly do you plan to turn this into a scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh?

There are a number of small but very specialized US based defense sub-component manufacturers that support 15 to 20 people with very good paying jobs, building stuff exactly like NDAA compliant UAS flight controllers. Not everything needs to become gargantuan to be a success.

There can also be very good money in manufacturing specialized things that require the work to be done by US citizens with a TS or TS/SCI clearance if you can get into that market.

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