{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"NC Tweener Talks","title":"Adam Steege, Founder & CEO of Trio Labs: The Startup Failure That Became a Med-Tech Manufacturer","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2483,"description":"Adam Steege, founder and CEO of Trio Labs, joins me to talk about building a company that 3D prints tiny, complex metal parts for medical devices out of Morrisville, North Carolina. The conversation covers Adam's path from a failed first startup in laparoscopic surgical devices to founding Trio Labs in 2015, the five years it took to reach bench-scale proof of concept, and the road from Series A funding in 2021 to commercial launch in 2023. Adam explains why his first company stalled, the manufacturing gap between traditional machining and semiconductor-style nanofabrication that Trio Labs fills, and why the company chose to sell finished parts rather than printing equipment. What makes this episode distinctive is how directly Adam connects his first company's failure to the thesis behind his second, along with a clear, first-principles explanation of why metal 3D printing at this precision is so difficult that Trio Labs describes itself as half ASML, half TSMC. It's a grounded look at what it actually takes to build a hardware company over more than a decade.\nTimestamps\n00:00 Cold open & sponsor thanks\n01:15 Welcome to NC Tweener Talks\n01:35 Scot's intro: Adam Steege & Trio Labs\n02:25 Interview begins\n02:50 Guest welcome\n02:55 NC Tweener Fund's investment history with Trio Labs\n03:30 Adam's origin story begins\n04:00 Growing up in NC, Carleton & Columbia\n04:55 Why med tech pulled him in\n05:40 The genesis of the Trio Labs idea\n06:10 Technical founder staying on as CEO\n08:10 What happened to the first company\n09:05 The \"stakeholder visibility mismatch\"\n11:20 From the first company's ashes to Trio Labs\n13:15 Trio Labs' basic pitch\n13:50 Why minimally invasive devices keep getting smaller\n16:10 The manufacturing gap Trio Labs fills\n18:05 Founding timeline: 2015 to Series A to commercial launch\n20:00 Gen 1 to gen 3: iterating the printer\n22:05 The \"third dimension is nonlinear\" analogy\n24:00 \"Half ASML, half TSMC\"\n25:05 Why metal instead of plastic\n28:50 Facility...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/UEzoK7N1siD9YRaSVBWfZ8B3suSS2aonEIZ5NwBH1Gs/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS80NjBh/YWVhZTA4ZTUyY2Fl/MDdhNzQwZWFhNDI4/MDc3Zi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}