Hardware Made Easy
Interview with Rich Mokuolu, co-founder and CEO of Partsimony based in Greater New York City Area, NY.
Partsimony is building the future cognitive supply chain. It is changing the way growing hardware companies collaborate with their existing manufacturer network, and discover new vetted manufacturers.
“I remember watching the movie Flubber for the first time, when I was 9 years old. I made the decision then and there that I wanted to be an inventor like Robin Williams in the movie, which later led to me focusing on Mechanical Engineering as a field of study at Georgia Tech (Go Jackets!). Moreover, the Flubber movie led to fun childhood projects like creating a flashlight using an aluminum can, wires, and batteries — I felt like I had invented a groundbreaking device at the time.
A day when I felt most proud of myself was winning 2nd prize at a Nigerian website design camp, when I was probably 12 years old. This achievement meant a lot to me because prior to that, I had considered myself a low-performing student and winning 2nd prize was the first time I saw myself as someone who could achieve anything given the right amount of focus and hard work. The icing on the cake was that the final competition was aired on the local Nigerian TV station, and a teacher who saw me as a student with little potential witnessed me win 2nd place to her amazement. This led her to push me harder to learn, since she saw my potential. I’m very thankful for that experience.
My twin brother Roland, and I were born in Nigeria and spent the first 15 years of our lives witnessing first-hand the impact of limited access to resources in the innovative process — this problem is further compounded in the hardware space, given the added complexity and domain expertise required to scale hardware products. Consequently, we decided to dedicate ourselves to the vision of democratizing hardware innovation — to empower innovators everywhere to create and scale hardware solutions, to tackle problems that plague their respective regions, and our global community.
The idea for Partsimony emerged from personal frustrations that my twin brother (Roland) and I observed in the hardware space. To provide some context, I was awarded a hardware patent related to the military space, and experienced first-hand how difficult it is to get the products I’d spent years developing and prototyping, actually made. My day job at the time focused on manufacturing and supply chain management, which exposed me to the frustrations and mistakes that even large organizations routinely make when scaling a hardware product — even when adhering to purported industry “best practices”.
Prior to co-founding Partsimony with Roland, I worked at a large Fortune 50 conglomerate, working in manufacturing and supply chain management. This work environment provided me with the unique opportunity to work on numerous high-stakes global supply chain initiatives across various multi-billion dollar industrial companies in the Aviation, Oil & Gas, Locomotive, and Renewable Energy sectors. Meanwhile, Roland was working on Wall Street as an Investment Banker, where he worked on several large-scale mergers & acquisitions and strategic refinancings as an Assistant Vice President for a bulge bracket investment bank.
As is common with most bootstrapped founders, the startup journey has definitely had its fair share of highs and lows. One of the more memorable lows was when I had quit my well-paying day job to work on Partsimony (called Inventaprint at the time). I had decided to move-in with my twin brother (and co-founder), sharing a full size bed and didn’t have a place of my own for 7 months. Roland and I had poured our savings into building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which ended up being quite buggy and didn’t give us the crucial traction that we had hoped for. On top of that, the CTO we had at the time decided to quit the team, right as we were looking to start fundraising based on the new insights we had received from our MVP. I vividly remember laying in a starfish position on my older brother’s bed (I was couch surfing at the time) contemplating life and thinking of polishing up my resume to return back to the stability of working at an enterprise company.
During the hard times, the sheer determination and tenacity of our amazing team (Drew, Peter, and Rohit) pulled us through to create innovative solutions that delighted our customers. Roland and I are forever grateful to them for believing in us, and making countless sacrifices to pursue Partsimony’s vision for the future of hardware innovation.
Fortunately, the dark clouds cleared, and we eventually received a major breakthrough and were able to sign a large company as a client, and achieved exceptional results — showing the integrity of our value proposition — our new approach worked better than we had imagined — to the tune of a 86% cost-savings for our first enterprise customer.
During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in NYC, Partsimony worked with SecondMuse and other community leaders in NYC as a member of a COVID-19 task force to address medical PPE supply shortages (i.e. N95 masks, surgical masks, protective wear, etc.) In addition, Partsimony was tasked with leading the manufacturing supply chain for FDA EUA approved ventilators to address hospital shortages. Attached are pictures for your reference, as well as a NY Times article on our efforts here.
The Bible, as well as our faith in Jesus Christ has had an enormous impact on our lives, and the vision we have for Partsimony. We work to conduct business with integrity and focus on being good stewards of the resources and opportunities that have been afforded to us.
To the entrepreneurs who are at the beginning of their journeys, remember that starting up a company is filled with many highs and lows — sometimes happening on the same day. You may feel emotionally exhausted, but these feelings are par for the course as an entrepreneur. Although you may have a grand vision, be humble enough to admit when you’re wrong, be resourceful at all times, and surround yourself with a strong community of individuals with diverse skill sets that you can build (and alter) your vision with.
Most importantly, it is vital to believe in something bigger than yourself. To truly achieve high-level impact, you can’t do it alone.”
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