Word: kirila
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...what DOS was to the personal-computer business in its early days. If it proves itself, it will lead the way toward an entirely new system of manufacture in which we can make things digitally. "If operating systems could run computers, they should be able to run a factory," Kirila says. "My big question was this: How do you leverage everything that is happening in the information age and use it to build tangible products...
...started this revolution is a beefy football jock who dropped out of college because he didn't think he was learning enough. Kirila grew up working the family farm in the shadow of the struggling steel mills of Pennsylvania's Shenango Valley, 60 miles north of Pittsburgh. He was as fascinated by manufacturing as some teenagers are by cars. In high school he was devising weight machines for his football teammates. An injury sidelined him in 1984, and he dropped out of Youngstown State University to get into the fitness-machine business. With a $500 deposit from a customer...
...Kirila, 35, is the kind of guy who sleeps only because he's dog tired, and then he's likely to bolt out of bed and down to the office with a new idea about moving molecules. On business trips to Tokyo (Japanese firms were his biggest customers), he would get his distributor to arrange access for him to factories. He spent two nights prowling the catwalks above a Nissan Maxima assembly line, studying every human and robotic move below. Obsessed? He dragged his wife on a factory tour of China and Japan during their honeymoon...
...Kirila sold his company to fitness giant Cybex and started Pyramid Operating Systems. That's when he and his engineering chief, Bob McCollum, devised a software program to control each step in the manufacturing process. A company offered them a lucrative contract to build storm drains, but Pyramid didn't have the $2 million needed to fashion or tool the proper steel mold to shape the pipe. That's when McCollum came up with a startlingly simple--and cheap--idea. Instead of a metal mold, why not fashion two pieces of composite in the shape of the product, inject...
Pittsburgh venture capitalists wanted nothing to do with it. Despite Kirila's charisma and his successful start-up, they saw in him a college dropout from a depressed steel valley. He faced an age-old paradox: his idea was too big to get funded, but he couldn't prove its worth unless he had the millions to start building stuff...