The product is only half of the work.
ABOUT SLADE SIMPSONI’ve spent more than fifteen years building hardware, first as an engineer and later as a product and engineering leader. Along the way, I started a company of my own and helped scale three more hard-tech startups. Over time, I began to see a pattern: the companies that succeed are not simply the ones with the most impressive technology. They are the ones building the right product for the customer, while also building a company capable of delivering it.
That second part is where many hard-tech companies struggle. Roadmaps become wishful thinking shaped by external pressure. Manufacturing realities surface too late. Teams grow before the work is ready for them. People burn out, creativity gives way to constant firefighting, and the organization begins to strain under the weight of its own ambition. With physical products, these problems are especially unforgiving. Decisions compound, feedback cycles are long, and by the time the consequences become obvious, they can be expensive or impractical to fix.
That is the work I do now through Ply. I draw on my experience across four hard-tech startups to help founders get both halves right: the product and the company that has to deliver it. I work as a partner who has actually been in the seat, not an advisor standing on the sidelines. It is the kind of help I wish I had when I was in the thick of building my own company.
It has been a hard, strange, and wonderful way to spend fifteen years, and I would not trade it for anything. I am genuinely excited to bring what I have learned to the founders I work with today.
Learn more about my journey below.
THE JOURNEYBuilt through iteration.
Great products are rarely the result of a single brilliant idea. They are built through iteration - by making something real, testing it against the world, learning where it falls short, and using that feedback to build the next version. I’ve treated my career in the same way I treat products. The result has not been a perfectly linear progression. It has been an iterative one - each chapter building on the last, expanding both the scope of the work and my understanding of what it takes to bring ambitious physical products into the world.
Honda R&D & CVG
2011-2013 · R&D ENGINEER · AUTOMOTIVE · WHERE IT STARTEDI started my career in automotive R&D, designing structural components for Honda and Acura and working with suppliers to develop new materials and manufacturing processes. It taught me engineering rigor - the discipline of getting the details right because real people depend on the outcome. At CVG, I went deeper into rapid prototyping and 3D printing, seeing both the technology’s potential and the limits that kept it from becoming a true consumer tool. That gap stayed with me, and eventually became the problem I left to solve.
Sculptify
2013-2019 · CO-FOUNDER & CEO · ADDITIVE CONSUMER HARDWARE · FOUNDING TEAMI left CVG to start Sculptify around a simple bet: if 3D printing could work with a much wider range of materials, it could become useful to more than industrial shops and engineers. The technology to prove that idea did not exist, so we built it - taking the product from concept to production-ready in about eighteen months and ultimately receiving an acquisition offer from MakerBot. We were only five people, which meant I could not stay inside the engineering. I was working across finance, fundraising, marketing, customer discovery, and manufacturing, often all at once. That is where I learned how interconnected every startup decision really is: a technical decision is also a cash decision, a hiring decision, and a go-to-market decision. Since then, I have never been able to look at a product without also seeing the business behind it and the person it is meant to serve.
Design Central
2015-2019 · ENGINEERING DIRECTOR · MEDICAL & CONSUMER HARDWARE · CLIENT-FACINGAlongside Sculptify, I led engineering across more than forty product development programs at Design Central, spanning medical devices, consumer electronics, and commercial products. Some engagements began as early concepts; others I helped carry through development, manufacturing, and launch. Because I also managed the client relationships, I had a rare view inside companies of nearly every size and stage, each with different technologies, constraints, and ways of working. Across all that variation, the same pattern kept surfacing: the teams that delivered most consistently were not necessarily the ones with the most raw talent, but the ones with the clearest alignment around the customer, the product, and the work required to bring it to life. Much of what I bring to a new company comes from having seen those patterns repeat across dozens of others.
Intellivision
2019-2022 · VP,PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT · CONSUMER HARDWARE · X-FN TEAMSAt Intellivision, I worked across product and product development to turn an ambitious consumer gaming platform - spanning a new console, games, and peripherals - into something a large, distributed team could build. That meant translating a broad vision into roughly four hundred requirements, coordinating more than a dozen global partners, and supporting a raise of over $40 million. It was also where I learned the power of saying no. When ambition outruns focus, every new idea adds complexity and gives the team another way to lose the thread. Much of my job was defining the product’s boundaries - what it needed to be, what it could not be, and what mattered most.
Path Robotics
2022-2024 · ENGINEERING DIRECTOR · AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS · 22-PERSON ORGAt Path Robotics, I built and led a 22-person engineering organization developing autonomous welding systems deployed in factories across North America. It was the largest team I had built, and some of the work I am proudest of. Working closely with the CEO and CTO, I set the hardware roadmap and guided the team through a major redesign of the platform - cutting its cost by nearly half in twelve weeks without sacrificing reliability, then moving to a modular architecture that reduced recurring engineering effort by roughly 75 percent. That work helped prepare the company for a $100 million Series D and showed me what is possible when strong teams, clear priorities, and disciplined engineering come together.
Red 6
2024-2026 · ENGINEERING DIRECTOR · DEFENSE/AEROSPACE AR · RAPID SCALINGAt Red 6, I led product engineering for an augmented reality system designed for fighter pilots. I grew the team from seven to twenty-one in six months, building the leadership structure, operating rhythms, and culture alongside the headcount, while leading execution on a $10.2 million DoD program through major technical milestones. I also helped drive a focused lightweighting effort that reduced system weight by 30 percent in eight weeks and helped unlock flight testing. The experience reinforced something I now bring to every scaling company: growing quickly is not just a hiring challenge - it is an org design challenge, and the team has to become stronger as it becomes larger.
15
years building hardware
4
hard-tech startups
9
products to production-ready
3x
team scaling, <2% attrition
BSME · Active Top Secret Clearance · 6 patentsCLOSINGIt’s all about what you bring forward.
None of these experiences followed a straight line, and the lessons did not come neatly packaged. They were earned by building, testing, getting things wrong, adapting, and trying again across different products, teams, and stages of growth. What matters now is what I carry forward from them - helping founders see around corners, make tough decisions with greater clarity, and build both the product and company with intention. That is what Ply is here to do.