We get the full tour of SendCutSend, the online metal fabrication company that has quietly become one of the busiest factories in America, and you get to see the entire operation from the loading dock back. Ashlee Vance walks the floor with founder Jim Belosic and follows a raw sheet of metal through every step it takes to leave as a finished part, roughly 100,000 of them every single day.
You see where the raw aluminum and steel come in, the 12 kilowatt Amada fiber lasers running four shifts a day, the water jets and CNC routers, the deburring and powder coating lines, the brand new five axis machine shop, and the shipping dock where 20,000 orders a month go out the door. Along the way Belosic explains how software runs the whole place, why he bought a baggage tug off Facebook Marketplace instead of spending 4 million dollars on robots, and the philosophy that keeps it all moving. Find good people, give them great software, and "just use dudes."
It is also one of the best looks you will get at the state of American manufacturing. SendCutSend is a front row seat to reshoring, high mix low volume production, and the quiet comeback of making things in the United States. Belosic gets into why orders are flooding in, how the company complements the mom and pop shops instead of killing them, and what surprise ends up in every single box.
Check our full interview with Jim Belosic on the Core Memory podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0bjZbiR8wk
LINKS
SendCutSend: https://sendcutsend.com/corememory/
Amada (the laser maker featured): https://www.amada.com/
ABOUT THE HOST
Core Memory is hosted by Ashlee Vance, a two time New York Times best selling author and filmmaker who has spent two decades covering technology and science for The Economist, The New York Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the author of the best selling biography of Elon Musk, created the Emmy nominated series Hello World, and produced HBO's Wild Wild Space and Netflix's Don't Die. With Core Memory, he drops into the labs, garages, factories, hangars, and occasional questionable warehouses where scientists, inventors, oddballs, and startups are building the future.
Subscribe to watch more Core Memory videos https://www.youtube.com/@CoreMemoryVideos/videos
Check out our podcasts https://www.youtube.com/@CoreMemoryPodcast
https://www.corememory.com/podcast
Find Ashlee Vance at
www.corememory.com
https://www.instagram.com/ashlee.vance/
https://x.com/ashleevance
Find Kylie Robison at
https://x.com/kyliebytes
https://www.instagram.com/kylie.robison
CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
01:46 How Busy Is Too Busy? Reading the Metal
03:09 The 1.3 Million Dollar Machine You Can't Stand Near
08:23 What 12 Kilowatts Does to a Sheet of Metal
13:38 Why "Just Use Dudes" Beats 4 Million in Robots
16:13 Turning a Sharp Edge Into a Finished Part
26:01 Inside the Fastest Growing Part of the Shop
32:41 Candy, Chaos, and 100,000 Parts a Day
