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Five decades of chemical engineering, the plants he was called in to rescue, and why he reads history to understand the AI boom, with our member Joel Shertok.
This week on People at Pyramid, we're spotlighting our member Joel Shertok, a chemical engineer and the president of Process Industries Consultants in Newark, Delaware. Joel has spent 50 years in the field, and he has the stories to prove it.
His work has always come down to two jobs: take a process a chemist developed and scale it up to commercial production, or walk into a plant that has started misbehaving and figure out why. He tells us about a membrane-filter line that suddenly began turning out unusable product. The culprit turned out to be a supplier that had changed a raw material to get around a patent fight and decided it was too small a detail to mention. That small detail cost tens of millions of dollars to engineer around. Then the supplier switched back.
Joel's career spans petrochemicals, advanced composites, carbon fiber, biotech, and filtration, and clients from zero-revenue startups to companies worth $100 million. He got into the field after reading a book called So You Want to Be a Chemical Engineer, comparing starting salaries, and making a very practical decision. Decades later, when his company told him it was time to retire, he simply started consulting, and the clients called him. No marketing, no sales.
Away from the lab, Joel is a history buff, and he reads about the end of the Weimar Republic and the crash of 1873 with a clear eye on the present. Ask him about today's AI boom and he will tell you how he thinks it ends.
Meet Joel, and hear five decades of the chemical industry in one conversation.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 - Meet Joel Shertok, Chemical Engineer
1:10 - When a Good Process Starts Making Garbage
4:30 - Consulting From Startups to $100M Firms
7:00 - History, Bubbles, and the AI Boom
GUEST LINKS:
Process Industries Consultants: https://processindconsultants.com
Joel Shertok on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelshertok/
ABOUT PEOPLE AT PYRAMID:
People at Pyramid is the Pyramid Club's member spotlight podcast. Every episode, we sit down with one of our members to hear what they do, what drives them, and the stories that make them worth knowing. Hosted by Vince Quinn.
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