YouSaid · the spoken record

Revathi Advaithi

lines on the record: 73
first: 2021-05-25
most recent: 2021-05-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Mentioned cost of capital, what you're talking about is the rates at which companies can get money to build things that is also government policy. It seems like we started out talking about manufacturing and we are running into the policies of various governments have a direct impact on manufacturing. How much time do you spend on that kind of what's called industrial policy versus operating the actual manufacturing company that you run”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The robot's working or make sure the program is working. So I think reskilling is a pretty significant issue that is important. So that's one big policy issue, Nile, that has to be top of mind. But the second one, obviously, is providing lower cost of capital. So we can't forget that. I know that's a complicated issue, but one of the big reasons why many Asian countries do well is that the cost of capital is much lower. So providing small businesses, medium businesses, cheaper cost of capital so they can set up these businesses, put the automation in, skill their labor, all that is important. So it's not as simple as just saying I can hire five people with the skills and then it's all going to be great.”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is not as simple as that, right? Because it is not as though you're just solving that with bringing 100 jobs from somewhere in Asia to bringing five jobs to the US. There is a significant skills gap, an education gap to also make that available, right? So the policy problem is skilling workforce, which is a huge part of the issues. Are they getting trained coming out of high school? Our apprentice programs are non-existent. How do you get people to train in technical education? So actually reskilling people for that is significant. If you think about the jobs I worked in as a factory supervisor in Shawnee, Oklahoma or Hutchinson, Kansas, those were heavy machining, heavy manufacturing job, very manual, which required a whole different set of skills in programming your machine, right? Being able to troubleshoot it and then make sure”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let me be painfully reductive and try to understand what you're saying there. And you're going to disagree with me, but I'm going to try. You're saying, well, we've automated so much that we don't need 50 low-skilled employees in China. We can get by with five highly paid managers of robots in the United States. Is that the right policy outcome? I mean, it's what's happening, but it's saying, oh, we solved our labor problem with automation. That seems like a very different class of problem.”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What type of manufacturing really fits with the United States? So semiconductors, which is a lot in the news today, like making chips, which are complex, those definitely are a great fit. Large things that you can't transport around the world, like making cars, those are a good fit. Anything like medical where it's complicated.”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“China or Southeast Asia or wherever, right? And those labor costs have gone up as those economies have developed and costs have gone up. Those labor costs have gone up. But also, the material costs have come down. Electronics costs have come down significantly. And the costs of putting these two together has come down because we have new equipment, a lot of automation, a lot of robots. productivity is amazing so that has also brought the total cost down so you don't need 100 people to make something anymore you could do it with five because you may have a fully automated machine you may have a robot helping you but you need highly qualified five people to do it right that starts to again bring the conversation back to yeah countries like the us or western europe that has a lost a lot of manufacturing jobs can play a role but i think what we have to be realistic about and this is the conversation we've been having”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you think about making a product, right, there is the material cost, where do you buy the electronics? Where do you buy the plastics that go around it? All the things that you buy to put a product together. And then you have to take it to some factory around the world and it costs labor to put all that product together. So you buy the material, there is labor costs. And then, of course, testing and all that stuff. And eventually it becomes a product. If you take all those costs, one of the biggest components of costs in many products, particularly consumer products was the labor side of it. That's why jobs moved to countries where there was cheaper labor.”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I'd say DLA. I know you've written and spoken a lot about this topic. I've seen you with your Wisconsin videos a few times. So I've definitely seen and heard you on this topic. We've been talking a lot, particularly to the new administration and as the incoming newcomer secretary came in, we spent a couple hours with her. You know, in terms of really trying to take the noise out of manufacturing in the country, it seems to be a hot topic, but it's also a very complicated topic. The reason that manufacturing left the United States is for the simple reason that labor arbitrage was better in some other part of the world, right? But those things have changed pretty significantly because labor costs have gone up in other countries. Equipment, automation have played a significant role. So that kind of”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things about manufacturing you mentioned Chicago, we just came out of the Trump administration. There was a huge push to bring manufacturing back into the United States, even outside of the Trump context. Manufacturing is permanently tied up in politics and policy around the world. There are trade issues, there are employment issues, there are national security issues in some cases. Where does flex fit into that conversation? Because the focus is usually on big consumer companies like GM or Microsoft or something, but Flex obviously plays a huge role in that. Where do you sit at the policy table?”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what we have to do to make that adaptable to the product and very specific product experts who are working on it with customers.”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Complicated in terms of the level of automation, the requirements around even something like sterilization of some of the sensors that go into your body. The sterilization process itself is so complicated, automated but complicated, that designing that manufacturing process is even more complex. Someday if you have time, you should go to one of our factories in Chicago, which is one of the most complicated drug delivery manufacturing setups that we have. And so designing that manufacturing is as important as designing the product itself because it's quite critical to make the product with the least quality issues, keep redesigning it so you're lowering cost or can a new design changes that are coming in changes the manufacturing itself. So we have to be able to do both. And they're both quite different capabilities. So we have different teams that work on manufacturing processes itself.”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have to do both. Let me give you an example. Maybe I'll bring it to life. So, for example, let's say one thing that's kind of near and dear to our hearts is these kind of drug delivery things that you put on your skin these days that are either sensing something in your body or eventually maybe it's kind of even transferring some product into your body used a lot for things like diabetes right In an example like that, what we would say is, you know, do we have to work on that sensor capability on that particular product that goes on your skin? Do we have to work on the electronics or even, for example, the communication capability on that? Because it usually talks to your phone and says, hey, are you low on Insilla and should you be giving yourself a shot? We will be working on all those aspects of it with the customer to design that particular product. So that's one aspect of it. But these days, it's so”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reason I ask is I'm really fascinated by the relationship between manufacturing innovation and consumer innovation. I can dream up all kinds of things, but you have to be able to manufacture it at its scale. And that scale manufacturing is what changes the world, right? I could have dreamed up the smartphone 20 years ago, and I probably did draw it in a notebook when I was 15 or something, but you had to figure out how to make it at scale and make it affordable. Where do you see the relationship between your investment into manufacturing innovation, how it enables the products that we see? Do you spend more time thinking of, well, we're a huge medical devices company, we're going to innovate on the core capabilities of the medical device, or do you spend more time saying we have to innovate in our manufacturing capability so that we can actually build all of the things that we're inventing?”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say most of the time what we try to do is have a platform design. I'll give you the, whether it's an air conditioner example or I'll use one that we do a lot of workaround is around audio, right? Like the things you're wearing on your head. We do a lot of kind of audio design work, which is base platform, which will do the wireless Bluetooth integration, which will keep up kind of what the next generation of those. Now there's a lot of work that's being done around hearing aids, right? becoming more integrated with your TV, with your phone and all of that. So we'll do base platform designs for audio that'll integrate all those basic things and we'll provide that to most customers and we'll say, okay, we'll keep up with all the generations of those because they move every day and you integrate that into your set of products or we'll integrate that for you into your headphone design, right?”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reason I ask is one of sort of the sillier jokes in tech coverage is very recently the instinct to just put a Bluetooth chip or a Wi-Fi chip in something and call it smart and now you've got a smart air conditioner. We see so many companies doing this stuff. Every year I go to the Consumer Electronics Show and I see more and more things with chips in them. And I wonder, well, did the air conditioner company hire an engineering team or do they just run out and find a reference design and slap it on the air conditioner? Who in the end is responsible for it? Because you have to care for computers in a very real way. Where does Flex come in there? Do you say, well, we can just make your air conditioner smart? Do you say we're going to do a ground up redesign of air conditioners that multiple companies can resell? Or is it we're just going to wait and see where the market takes us?”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should make who's doing it better, right? So I'd say it just varies by segment in terms of who actually designs what part of a product.”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say each segment is somewhat different in the hair straightener example, right? Usually kind of the aesthetic parts of it, the parts that kind of touch and feel by the consumer itself is usually dealt by the company that is taking it to the consumer itself. The behind the scenes in terms of the touchscreens, how the electronics work, Bluetooth, wireless, any of those types of packaging, design usually is done by customers like ours. So what we say is sometimes we purely make things, sometimes we join design, many things with the customers, and sometimes we just say, okay, here's a set of array of components you can put into your product and redesign it. So yeah, a lot of companies won't make everything end-to-end because it doesn't make sense. You should only make what you're really good at and everything else somebody else.”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing that is complicated to understand, and I think people don't see, we see consumer brands, and they say, let's pick a hair straightener, for example. We've made a new hairstener. It's got all these features and they do the marketing. I always assume, well, they must have a bunch of engineers and designers on staff at that brand that invented a new hair straightener. That is not always the case, right? What is the split between how much of that work happens at the hair straightener company and how much is happening at Flex that you're then selling and repackaging for various companies?”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything from vacuum cleaners, hair straighteners, coffee machines to autonomous cars to diabetes equipment, everything in the middle”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, great. You know, when I took this role with Flex, I remember my kids telling me, Mom, you go to all these companies, nobody's ever heard about. I worked at Eton before and then Flex. And they're like, why can't you go to like Coca Cola or Apple or somewhere where we can get all these free products? And then I get to Flex and then they're so excited because we make so many different things. We make everything from something as complex as a full autonomous electronics package for kind of the next generation of autonomous cars to hairsteners and think of everything in the middle. So we are in the medical space, we're in the automotive space. We do a lot of industrial work like energy meters, inverters, things like that, power products. We make a lot for the cloud data center space. Of course, consumer businesses and used to make a lot of things like cell phones, but that part of our business we have slowly reduced. But think about something we probably make it. And that's how I like to explain it to people.”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm excited to talk to you. I have a million questions for you talking to the CEO of a big global manufacturing company at this moment in world history, I think, is a great opportunity. So I just want to get started at this start. Flex is one of those companies that is kind of in all of our homes. I ran through my house today looking for things that were manufactured by Flex. And it's like a long list, but you don't have a huge public profile. You're not a company that's out in front in sort of consumers' minds. So at the very beginning, tell us what Flex does and who your customers are.”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They write code on their computers, they put it on the internet, and they're often running. And yes, there are often important policy issues in the mix, but they are nothing compared to the issues of running a global manufacturing company at scale around the world. That said, some of the problems are the same. Regular decoder listeners will know that we somehow always end up talking about content moderation, and I was surprised to hear that even Flex, a company that makes stuff, has to think hard about what customers they will and will not work with. This one is really fascinating. Revathi invite the CEO of Flex. Here we go. Advice that you're the CEO of Flex. Welcome to Decoder.”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nehi Patel, editor in chief of the Verge. In Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week I'm talking to Ravathi Advaithi, CEO of Flex. Now, Flex isn't a hashold name, but it is definitely in your household. It's the third largest electronics manufacturing company in the world. It makes everything from hair dryers to the Mac Pro to autonomous driving systems for electric cars. We talked about all of that, and we also talked about the rise of automation and how to think about the future of the manufacturing workforce worldwide. There are going to be fewer people managing more robots as time goes on, and that means we'll have to train people differently and think about education and labor policy very differently. In fact, pay attention to how often this conversation comes back to incredibly complex global politics. A lot of times in the show, I talk to people who make software.”
2021-05-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to build everything, with Flex CEO Revathi Advaithi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT