Building the AI Operating System for Apparel Manufacturing with ThreadLabs Co-Founders Rylan Jimenez & Diora Juraboeva
18VC Podcast · Episode 6 · June 3, 2026
Guests: Rylan Jimenez, Diora Juraboeva
Source: https://www.18-vc.com/podcast/threadlabs

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to our audiences, and a huge welcome to our guests today, Rylan and Diora, the co-founders of ThreadLabs, which is a company building the operating system of apparel productions. Thank you both for joining us on the 18VC Podcast today. And for those who may not be familiar with the 18VC Podcast, we are a student-run podcast featuring student founders, operators, and investors betting on the youngest and smartest minds. And the host today will be Philip, that's me, and also David.

Hello. And I come to meet Rylan and Diora as classmates, and I happen to be in the same class and the same team with both of them in a separate class, which is amazing. And they are incredible teammates in the class, and when I become more excited when I learn more about their journey on both their startup and also the venture capital side of their story. And Rylan and Diora have both served on as a core executive board of Spark SC, which is a leading innovation and entrepreneurship club at USC.

They also founded the VC Academy, which is the largest VC community at USC, and they have organized company visits to the top VCs, like a16z, Lightspeed, and Pure VC, and more. And I just wish I can know you guys earlier, enjoy your track. And they both work at Ghost, which is a private B2B marketplace that aims at transforming how global brands manage their surplus inventories, and they have been serving product and operation and growth roles in it. And later they founded ThreadLabs and joined the Techstar Accelerator program.

Now, when we start our own podcast, I said we definitely should talk to them, and here they are. Thank you so much for joining us today, and also a huge congratulations for your graduation recently. Yeah. Thank you. And so let's move on to your story and the ThreadLab story now. For sure. So yeah, starting for Rylan, I've seen that you've spent a lot of your career in venture capital world, from the 1752 VCs and Fortify and recently to Mucker.

So how did you start exploring your career, for example, your first internships in venture capital? Because I think it's not that common to start as a venture capital investor, right? Most people, for example, they probably, especially for business students, they may go for, I don't know, IBs or consultings or equity research, and it's not that a common path. And also, what makes you feel interest in the VC space?

And yeah. Yeah. Well, I think you have to kind of understand the weird period I was in when I started really diving deep into VC. So it's true, I started sort of interning in VC at a pretty young age, or pretty early stage, I guess you could say, in my academic career. So what happened initially was I actually came to USC as a mechanical engineering major.

I was okay at it, but it was definitely not as exciting as I thought it was going to be and just needed a little bit more time to work on things that I actually wanted to build, essentially. What I wanted to build, though, was not very apparent. So I think the first way that I really got introduced into what VC was was I took this class at USC called MDA 300, which is basically a blanket class for a bunch of little small topics, it's like a two-unit class. So it's not anything very extensive.

But one of the classes was taught by James Bottom, who would go on to be very important in my career path, my very young career path into entrepreneurship and VC. But he taught a class called Introduction to Venture Capital. Mm-hmm. Or maybe it was called Early Stage Investing, Introduction to Early Stage Investing. I can't remember now, but it was basically the very basics, like understanding how to put together a cap or what a cap table was, understanding how to read a term sheet.

It was just very basic stuff. But I found it very interesting because it was nothing really I had learned in any of my other martial classes. So this happened at the beginning of my sophomore year, right as I was transitioning from being an engineer to finding something else. It was still unclear. I was like, "Okay, maybe I'm going to go be a business administration major," or, "I'm going to go be an international relations major." I wasn't entirely sure, but I was taking martial classes to try to figure that out.

And then from there, one thing led to another, and I basically ended up at Pegasus, which is now called 1752. And then that kind of just led me down the rabbit hole of all the other internships that I worked in VC. And ultimately, VC is definitely an end goal still, but it's unclear at what point I'll end up really diving deep into VC, just because I feel like at this point, starting a company is more exciting to me. I'm more passionate about that, for sure.

And that's kind of where we're at now. A very general overview, but we're happy to dive into any specifics of that. Yeah, definitely. And I think, does that experience in VC internship teach you, what does that experience teach you about the startup space? And is that experience that also leads you to join a startup like Ghost or even founding your own startups now?

Yeah. I think I'll start off, and then Diora can also jump in with her opinion on this, but I think the way that a lot of people like to look at it is actually from the other perspective, which is, okay, if I want to work in VC, for example, what is the best way for me to break in? And a lot of people will tell you, "You should go be an operator first. You should go be a founder first." I definitely agree with that.

I think that's definitely a better path than trying to jump into VC early on. But ironically, I've also found that having some experience in the VC space, even if it's very minor, like an internship, has been super instrumental in starting a company. Because I think, again, being able to look at starting a company from an investor perspective not only teaches you what they want to hear during fundraising, let's say, for example, but also just gives you a North Star in terms of what it means to run a venture-backed company. Mm-hmm.

So, at my time at some of these VC firms, I met a lot of founders who were building a lot of interesting companies, some of which were very early, some of which were a little bit farther along. But just having, through repetition, seen a lot of these founders, their pitch decks, the way they carried themselves in meetings, the ones who were successful in those meetings, the ones who were not, I think all that has been wildly helpful as a young entrepreneur, because it's stuff that I, simply put, would not have had access to had I not gone to work in VC for a little bit. I don't know if, Diora, you have a different perspective on this, but... Yeah, I think it really helps you with developing your pattern recognition on, as a VC, you will look at so many pitch decks, you'll meet so many founders, you'll understand so many different business ideas that it sort of forces you to develop a stronger sense of what's working and what's not working, what you should try and strive for, and what you should avoid.

And that's really helpful when you're building your own business, because someone who hasn't worked in VC might take them three months to realize that they're doing something wrong, whereas if you have, you just have just a little bit more training, and just being able to spot something and be like, "Oh, this pricing doesn't make sense," very immediately, which is very helpful. Yeah, I think- And by the way, sorry, just to jump, one last thought. You don't even have to really work in VC to get the exposure to these terms or these pieces of knowledge that are going to be really helpful, but you should definitely at least do your own research. I have a quick anecdote.

There's a founder, which I think is an... Okay, so there's this particular accelerator. I'm trying not to name names because I don't, not sure who's going to see this, but there's this particular really, really popular accelerator that I happen to have a really good relationship with. And one of the founders of this, in the most recent cohort, is one of the best founders I know.

Has already scaled a company in the past, exited that company, but it was completely bootstrapped. So the idea of venture funding was completely alien to them before they came onto this accelerator, and it's funny how not having had exposure to running a venture scalable business for venture capital in any way has made it not difficult, but has definitely added roadblocks to understanding how to scale at a venture scalable pace. So, now they're definitely a lot more familiar, and they're well on their way to raising a round of funding. But it's funny, you can be a great entrepreneur, a great founder without knowing this stuff, if you were completely bootstrapped, for example.

And it definitely is not intuitive, even if you are a good founder. This stuff is not intuitive, and you should definitely do your due diligence on understanding this part of the business, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. I will also say that, being from the VC perspective, it does lead you to overthink a lot more. Because you're so used to thinking about, oh, how can I spot all the possible things that are wrong with this business, that when you're building your own business, it's very easy for you to be like, "Oh, we shouldn't do this because of this," or, "We shouldn't do this because of this." And then you just can get into a spiral as well.

So, maybe it's better to be oblivious, but who knows? Yeah. I have been hearing the argument saying that if you've been working as a VC in early of your career for several years, you may not be a good founder later. Because you're just too concerned. You maybe just see too many failures, and you just get a little bit afraid of doing your own startups, and you just...

Yeah. And maybe sometimes when you don't know that much and a little bit fearless is actually a good thing for doing a startup. For sure. Yeah. You have that delusionality. Yeah, definitely. And also, what part of the startup journey actually was more exciting to you comparing to the VC job, for Rylan? Because you said probably doing your own startup is even more interesting and more exciting, right?

Yeah, maybe I worded that wrong. I wouldn't say it's more exciting. I would say that they're exciting for different reasons. Mm-hmm. And at this point in my life, I think starting a company... excites me for the right reasons. Mm-hmm. So I think VC is exciting because you get to be a learner at the same-- Your job is to learn, essentially, right? The diligence cycle for some of these companies is two to four weeks, depending on where you work, obviously.

But, in that time, you're trying your very best to become an expert in whatever it is that you're looking to invest in, right? And obviously, the best investors have industry knowledge already, or at the very least, they have a niche that they're investing in, in which they're already very informed, right? But if you're working at a smaller fund, you're learning a lot in a very short span of time. I think that that's first and foremost great.

I think being up to date with all the different amazing founders and amazing companies that are being built around you is just such a privilege, and I think that's very exciting. I think there's a lot of other things that excite me about VC, but that's the most exciting part. When it comes to starting a company, I think what is more, again, not exciting, but what attracts me more about starting a company, is the fact that you really get to sink your teeth into something that you genuinely care about, and that's the only thing you're focused on while you're building that company. So for us, it's manufacturing.

It started off with manufacturing and apparel, and more recently, the scope has increased a bit, but just manufacturing. I'm only reading about supply chain. I'm only reading about the trends, investing trends in this industry. And just being able to, again, submerge yourself into this deep rabbit hole of this one specific vertical, is just something that I think at this age I can do.

Because I'm young, I don't have to sleep that much, and I can spend a lot of time doing research and working on one particular problem. I think when I get older, I'm not going to want to do as much intense focus on a specific vertical for longer than four weeks to two months. So yeah. That's what I find exciting. Di, you got anything? No, I think you answered that perfectly.

Okay. Cool. Yeah. And then for Diara, from my knowledge, you are more been focused on the building side, right? Your journey, you start building F1 racing cars and entrepreneurships even in high school, I think. And then later in USC, you've been working as UI/UX designers, product managers in USC's racing team, with a collaboration project with Honda and also the Fisher Price, and the Ghost.

And what drives you to start building from an early age? Yeah, I think I've always just been super drawn to building things, and I think initially, actually, it was very much physical products. I always just loved the idea of being able to build something that I could hold and sort of work with my hands. It just felt super exciting to me to be able to sort of see something appear out of nothing, and that's why I was initially drawn to a lot of mechanical engineering things, like the F1 things that I did in high school and continuing on at USC racing.

Just really excited me to be able to go in every day and build something that really wasn't there the day before. And I think during my time at IWAY, I was really exposed to a lot of digital tools and digital building as well. So I learned how to design with Figma and learned about UI/UX. And that was sort of just basically another avenue for me to learn how to build other things, which was super cool to learn as well, because previously, in high school, I never had a UI/UX or digital design background at all.

So yeah, I really appreciated my time at IWAY, being able to learn not only the physical side, but also the digital side as well, and that's something that definitely I take forward into starting a startup, which is really important training to have, just to be able to have good design sense, be able to understand how to design things for the user and have user empathy first. And that really helps build something that people really want. Yeah, definitely. Then you have a complimentary set, both on the set hardware side and also the software side, or the design side.

And, how did you later get into the VC space, in Forty Five Ventures and also starting the VC Academy? Yeah, so I think my time in VC actually started by starting VC Academy. I remember when it was my sophomore summer, I was thinking about what I could do next in my junior year that felt really that would help me grow more as a person. And I knew that before that, I spent a lot of time at USC racing.

I had also spent a lot of time doing design and product work. And at that point, I was just feeling like, oh, I feel like I'm not really learning anything significantly new by continuing this. So over the summer, I was sort of challenging myself, thinking, like, "What can I do that's completely new?" And when I was talking to a lot of my friends, they told me about how there's so many of these product-building communities on campus. There's Lava Lab, SCP, you can learn how to build something.

You could take classes at IWAY, learn how to build something. It's very accessible. However, when it comes to what to do after you've built the product, there's not many resources available specifically for undergrad students. I think a lot of the classes around VC, as we've taken together, are for master's students specifically. So I realized this was a big gap, and I spoke to Rylan about this, and we were like, "Okay, like-"Why don't we start some sort of VC community, VC club, VC education course?

And that's sort of how it started over that summer. And throughout the junior year, we basically developed that, and through making those connections with people in VC, so reaching out to different managing partners, reaching out to people at Techstars, at Fortify Ventures, we brought them all in as guest speakers, and then we were able to make those good connections after that. So after we had that good interaction with them, they were really excited about what we were building here at USC, and then they would always email us and be like, "Hey, we have these roles opening. Could you refer some of your people from the club that you started?" And that's how we were able to really get deep in the VC world.

Yeah, definitely. So now that we've learned a bit about your yourselves' backgrounds, we just wanted to learn a little bit more about how you guys got together. Obviously, VC Academy seems to be a start, but you guys also have a lot of overlapping orbits like Spark SC, Ghost, and Techstars LA cohort. So could you tell us about how you guys got together, get to know each other, and decide to formulate this idea of starting building a company together?

Sure. Yeah, I think what's funny is, well, for one, we've been working together since probably our second month in college in some capacity, so almost four years now. And looking back at it, it seems like manufacturing was always going to be something we're going to be interested in anyway. Like Diora mentioned, we all started off kind of working in a physical, mechanical engineering space, which was Formula SAE.

So if you guys don't know what Formula SAE is, it's basically a global competition where college students build Formula-style race cars, and then drive them in a series of different competitions. And that's where we met. So it was our second month there when I had basically taken a couple of weeks off because realized college was getting serious and had to lock in, and then I came back after two or three weeks, and Diora was there. And yeah, since then we have basically hit it off in a working capacity.

We worked together on not just race cars, we worked together on VC Academy, like Diora mentioned, which was really the first time that we went, okay, outside of the mech-y sort of space, what can we build together that's going to be meaningful to people? And outside of working on somebody else's thing, what can we build together? That was really the first instance of sort of testing our relationship to see if it was possible to build something completely new. And I would say that it was super difficult.

There was days where we were really excited about what we were building, and we were like, "This is going to be an amazing community for people." And there was days where we were literally sitting on a couch crying because we were like, "Holy shit, this is way harder than we anticipated." And it doesn't seem like it's going to work out. But I think the one thing that has been really, I guess you could say, easy about working with Diora is the fact that when stuff gets really tough, regardless of who it's tough for, if it's more tough on me or it's more tough on Diora, we kind of make sure that we're always at 100%, right? When she's at 70% and I'm 30%, we're going to cover for each other on that other percentage that we're missing in terms of effort. So it never really feels like I have to hunt her down for stuff, just because we're so close at this point, and we understand each other's work style very well.

So yeah, we built VC Academy, and while we were building VC Academy, in the very early days, there was a Google Makeathon that was being ran by Spark. And it was basically this competition for USC students to build both conceptual and real MVPs for AI products. And they had different tracks, depending on what you wanted to build. And there was, I forget the name of the track, but it was basically for speculative ideas that either were not necessarily possible yet or were at the very least, very difficult to build within the two-day window that we had to build.

Yeah. Also, just to note, this was early 2024, so a lot of- Yeah ... the AI systems hadn't been as good as they are now. Yeah. LLMs were not nearly as capable as they are now. They're improving at such an insane rate. So a lot of the things that our first iterations of Thread Labs and so on have been capable of doing were just not possible at the time.

But we imagined a product where basically AI could assist brands in the design portion of their workflow, up until pre-production, which was building mock-ups, tech packs, sewing patterns, and packaging it all into this one tool that helped brands basically create at a faster rate. But not necessarily in the sense that we were using AI to actually design the design of the products, but to move from finished idea to pre-production as quickly as possible.And then from there, we kind of shelved the idea because we were like, "Okay, LLMs are not capable necessarily of constructing tech packs in two minutes right now. So we'll come back and revisit this later on." And sure enough, about, I don't know, maybe let's say like a year later, we got together again and decided it was time to work on the idea, and also got together with our CTO, his name's Dennis Pavlov. He's not here, but we got together, we kind of went over the idea, and we started building from that point on forward.

So, it's kind of where we're at now. And yeah, let's- Okay ... I don't know if I missed anything, Diora. No, that was great. So, just want to check with you, Rylan, because at the beginning of the semester when we first met, I remember you talking about how your background began from fashion industry. Mm-hmm. That's how it led to ThreadLabs. So, just wondering, but it seems like you guys started from manufacturing, more specifically towards especially cars, sports cars maybe, considering how you talked about work.

Yeah. Well, it seems like, in my mind, the way that I think about it is- Uh-huh ... that made us interested in manufacturing. But the original days of working on ThreadLabs was not to build manufacturing software or a product for manufacturers. It was actually more so building a product for fashion designers or brands. And that's why when we met originally, we talked a little bit about my background and that, which we can get into deeper if you'd like.

But to give the short overview, I worked as a freelance fashion designer, probably up until the end of my freshman year in college. So probably until I was 19-ish, and had been doing it since I was 16. And back then you could get away with that because there was no AI, so Photoshop, Illustrator, all that stuff was still very useful to brands. Now not so much, but yeah, that's kind of how I got my start in being interested in fashion pre-production, just because there was definitely days where I had to build tech packs and it took an insanely long time.

I still have friends who don't build tech packs with AI, and it's taking them like 10 days to finish a tech pack for one product. So yeah, that's definitely where I got the original idea, or the original oversight into the problem, if that makes sense. Okay, makes sense. Okay, so just going more into the company you guys are building now, so could you tell us about the origin behind the name ThreadLabs?

Yeah. And describe what it does to someone who's maybe not too familiar with manufacturing or apparels. Sure. Yeah, so it's funny because the name ThreadLabs is like, we made it in literally a minute. We had no name for the products we were working on. Mm-hmm. But we were at a Google Labs competition, and it was for apparel designers, so we just kind of married the two, and that's kind of how the name came about.

Which, by the way, is getting rebranded just because we're working, technically the product's a little different, so we won't talk about what that is yet, but that's essentially the point we're at now. But yeah, ThreadLabs just came from marrying those two together. And now that we are not necessarily working on a product for brands, it is definitely going to be confusing, and that's kind of where we're like, "Okay, we've got to move in a different direction with the name, and find something that's a little more relevant to manufacturing." Okay. So manufacturing's always been described in US, and probably other countries as well, as low margin, relationship driven, and traditionally a little bit more conservative towards tech implementation, especially software.

So what do you think is different today, and how ThreadLabs differs from preexisting competitions, and what evidences, observations have you made in coming toward that conclusion? Sure. That's a very big question in terms of just the scope of stuff that we could cover. I don't think there's enough time to talk about everything. But I'll try my best to give an overview.

So what's interesting about manufacturing today is just there's so many sort of, how do you say it? The current political climate, not just domestically, but throughout the world, has different implications on manufacturing everywhere. So for example, high tariffs for certain countries made it difficult for even companies like Ghost to be able to bring in foreign goods, right? So if you were a small brand that had to manufacture quickly, and at a reasonable price, manufacturing in China, for example, got very difficult a couple of years back when those tariffs first showed up.

And because of that, we've seen, personally, a resurgence of these brands and these creators who no longer want to make foreign produced goods.So they're looking for these manufacturers in LA, New York, the middle America, that can quickly turn things around at not too high of a cost, and they get to use Made in America as a branding opportunity. Right? And that's one thing we noticed. It doesn't mean that we're going to be onshoring production to America entirely anytime soon, but that's just something we noticed, and that made us go, "Aha." It seems like there's a lot of movement in this space right now, and there's definitely ways we can capitalize on this new movement, which is that, one, there will be hopefully onshoring of manufacturing back to the US, in a small period of time.

I am not entirely sure what that period of time is. A lot of people think it'll come quicker than 10 years. I'm not entirely sure. The price is just not there to be able to produce goods super cheaply. But I'm confident enough that there will be some onshoring of manufacturing within the next decade or maybe a little bit longer. And because of that, manufacturers are going to need the sales and ops infrastructure to be able to run efficient businesses.

In China, for example, I've talked to a potential Chinese customer recently, and they already have ERP systems in place that they've been using for the past 20 years. Right? We talked to manufacturers here who have been in the business for 40-something years, some really, really old manufacturers here in LA. They still don't have ERP systems. They're way behind to foreign, or international manufacturers.

So we don't necessarily want to shove a new ERP onto them and make them use these new products that are complicated to use, to be quite honest. It's more about building an intelligence layer that sits on top of their current tool set, so that they don't need to adopt to a new ERP, or they don't need to use an ERP that has an AI agent that lives inside of it that's just wrapped in there to say it's an AI ERP. Which, to be quite honest, was one of our original ideas. We're just going to build a better ERP that had AI tools already built into it.

But it turns out ERPs are made for humans, for one, and they're also very, very complicated. So competing with ERP providers was just not realistic for how quickly we wanted to scale. So that's why we positioned to a slightly different product that allows manufacturers instead to keep those same ERP systems, to keep those same WhatsApp chats, Gmail chats, whatever, and basically have better oversight on them. So it doesn't matter if you're a manufacturer in the US that has no ERP system, or you're a Chinese manufacturer who has an ERP system you've been using for 20 years.

We are the intelligence layer that connects everything that you use and just gives you better oversight over your business. Definitely. And so I think your experience in, let's say, running a club, I think that helped you discover the problem to some extent, right? Because I remember seeing your post there. You said you've been developing products and visit manufacturers in person and also connecting them to clubs on USC campus.

And you have learning about industry by living through it and as a key member running these clubs, you also know that it's been kind of broken in the industry, like how they're disconnected on the customers and also the manufacturers. So can you share a little bit more? What did you learn during the experience, during your visit to the manufacturers, and also how-- I also remember the quote, like, the manufacturers are begging you to build ThreadLabs, right? Yeah.

What would you discover when you are talking to these manufacturers, and what's broken in the process? Yeah. So we discovered a couple things. Well, first, before I get into that, I guess I could talk about the experience that we both had working with manufacturers, before we necessarily decided to build a software product. So as I told you guys earlier, I was a freelance designer, and at times, it wasn't just design, it was also handling production for these brands, right?

Because they were very small. They wanted to focus on designing and didn't have time to source a good manufacturer. And thankfully, at this point, I have a lot of good connections in LA, specifically for apparel manufacturing. So there was times where I would literally have to drive down to DTLA and walk into the factory and ask to check on a specific order, get some updates.

So I've spent hours, probably hundreds of hours, on factory floors at this point, just getting to learn at their smallest stages, what makes an efficient factory or what makes an inefficient factory. And we learned one thing, that doesn't matter how you necessarily bring about this positive, I guess you could say positive change, but-There's only one thing that manufacturers care about, especially at the smaller stage, which is, how do I get more business? So what we started doing was we were basically sourcing brands and clubs at USC to come do production with our different manufacturers that we had in LA. And that's also how we learned a lot about how they communicate with the customer, or how they keep up with their orders.

Because, to be quite honest, some of them were just overwhelmed, and they didn't have the ability to check their WhatsApp or pick up their phone or send an email back quick enough. So when we proposed the idea originally of just making a better ERP system, some people were very excited and were willing to try it out, while other manufacturers were like, "I don't really want an ERP system. I'm good with WhatsApp. I'm good with Gmail.

I don't want a new CRM that's going to help me track communication. I want to keep using these tools, but I still want better oversight, and I still want the ability to free up some of my pipeline and organize some of my business so that I could bring in more business." Right? So at the end of the day, that's what we learned that manufacturers really, really wanted, at least here in LA, is just more business and more capability to work with new customers. So I think that's the biggest thing that we took away from our time working with these smaller manufacturers here.

Definitely. And actually, let's move on to the product you're building there. So I think, also from your post, I read that there are three major observations that makes you think ThreadLabs is a good solution. The first is that probably, as you just mentioned, more manufacturers, more onshore manufacturers, is emerging. And also brands want to start with a small order, and they don't want to commit thousands of units up front.

And also they find that picking the right factory is very important, right? And so from the manufacturer and consumer side, what actually change in their day-to-day business when they're using ThreadLabs? What is actually the process when they are using your product? Yeah. Well, from the brand side, I'll talk a little bit about what ThreadLabs was supposed to be and where it is now, just to give you guys a better idea of what the product currently does versus what it does not do.

So just a couple of months ago, ThreadLabs was supposed to be an end-to-end platform that basically gave small brands access to things like tech pack generators, very basic PLM software that was not very expensive, and that was also connected to a platform for manufacturers that allowed them to have oversight over their business. And by basically having reputable partners on the manufacturing side, we could attract more brands to want to work with us, use our software, and then order their production runs through our software and match with one of our manufacturing partners. So that was the original idea behind ThreadLabs. Today, it's very different.

ThreadLabs today is just a layer that sits on top of all, like I said, all the tools that manufacturers already use. So it's no longer necessarily a new platform, although we do have a platform overview dashboard. It's not necessarily built for brands anymore. It's built for factories to just have better oversight over the operations they already have, and to hopefully run more efficient businesses.

So the way it works now is you have the ability to connect your ERP system, your Gmail, your WhatsApp, or any other messaging tools that you use to currently take in orders, including CRMs. And from there, we have agents that handle different aspects of the production to operations side of the business. So when you receive an order, for example, let's say David texted me right now and was like, "Hey, I need 400 hoodies. They all need to be black.

They all need to be screen printed. Here's the image file. Oh, and I need it by June 10th." Right? That's a lot of information for one person to have to remember, and then go plug into their ERP system, or to write down on separate notes, or to send it to themselves as a text message and then have to go back later and remember, "Wait, did I put this in my ERP system?" It's a lot, especially when you're getting bombarded with 40, 50 different order, sort of inbounds every day.

So what our agents do is they organize that data that's coming in in a very raw form, text message, Gmail, whatever, and they're organizing it in a way that is more digestible for the systems that are already in place for a lot of these factories. So a lot of these factories have people who their entire job is to sit there and organize the ERP system, or put info into their ERP system. We can eliminate 80% of their workload by just automating all these parts of the business, and basically make their job more of an oversight job, where you're just making sure that everything that is being processed by our agents is accurate and meets up with the capabilities that are offered by your factory. So does this correctly analyze the timeline that they want and compare it to what's realistic based on how busy we are right now?And have we followed up with a customer that we sent a quote to and has not responded, for example?

There's just a lot of these really minute things that can be fixed through having agents basically make your business more efficient. So that's what the business currently looks like. It's very general. It's a very sort of complicated product and maybe sometime I'd be happy to run you guys through a demo, but essentially, there's a lot of just small things that we sort of automate as a business.

Yeah, definitely. And one follow-on question on that is actually you mentioned different factories, they may have their own ERP systems, right? How can your product be fit to different manufacturers that may have different systems? Do you need a tailored implementation, or is it a general agent that can handle different forms of ERP automatically? Yeah.

So we do need to connect specifically to whatever ERP they are using. Thankfully, a lot of manufacturers use a lot of legacy software that is honestly pretty easy to find, or pretty easy to connect to different platforms, for example, just through API keys and that sort of thing. But yes, it is definitely at this stage of the business, we are very white glove. We are very hands-on when it comes to onboarding, just because, like you mentioned, some manufacturers use very different ERP systems to others.

Yeah, definitely. And we want to move on a little bit to the AI agent layer of the product you're doing there. So, I think on your website, there are three AI features. Basically, a smart timeline, a risk flagging, and also update autopilot. So, for each of them, how do they work? What kind of results do they deliver for the users of your platform? Yeah.

So today, it's-- Oh, Diora, would you like to go? Yeah. I think for those three features, those are things that we thought about because when we were directly thinking about what are the main problems in the manufacturer's workflows right now, we identified those as some of the most important ones. So firstly, talking about the timeline feature, a lot of manufacturers today, they don't actively have a good understanding of when their project is starting and when it's ending.

So if you've ever tried to work with a manufacturer, you'll find a lot of the time they'll be like, "Oh, it's delayed by this time. It's delayed again." And this is very common in the manufacturing industry because these manufacturers are just taking so much orders, and they just don't even have track of what's going on, which is why we sort of thought we need to implement some sort of timeline feature in which instead of them having to do the work in putting in like, "Oh, by this date, I need to do this," because that's just not feasible. They're not going to spend time doing that. We want to implement AI so that it can basically generate based on the shop's existing data, and see, okay, this manufacturer took two weeks to make this design, this complexity, this many pieces.

So we're going to estimate that this is going to take about two weeks. And if it does detect that, for example, for the risk part, if it detects that maybe they're taking in way more orders than usual, then that's the point at which it'll flag, "Hey, by the way, these timelines that you initially committed to, we think that you might not be able to meet those because you have too much capacity currently," or maybe you're running out of this material that you'll need. And then it'll be able to adapt those timelines and just keep everything on track. And this is also very important to integrate with the communication piece, because if you are a brand, obviously you are texting your manufacturer like, "Hey, what's the update?" And manufacturers are also just, they just don't have time to go back and text every single person manually and remember all of their orders.

So if we were to have a situation in which an order's being flagged for risk, the timelines needs to be shifted, and then it can automatically notify the customer, "By the way, your timeline is shifting by a week." You're no longer going to have those situations in which brands are really angry and frustrated because there's just no communication, and they're telling you the day before like, "Oh, oops, sorry." And that sort of really helps build brand trust overall as well. Yeah, definitely. I think a timely communication solves a lot of concerns and potential conflicts there. And about the type of product, actually, you are able to kind of deliver or able to communicate between the manufacturers.

I remember there was, say, listed in your websites, DTGs and screen print, and also cut and sew. Is that a template across just different product lines, or is it a handmade service for each of these individual different products? And how are they different? Yeah, so these are actually just different types of printing. Mm-hmm. So they're not different products.

Okay. For example, when a brand is-- They might be ordering a hoodie that has DTG printing, or they might be ordering a hoodie with screen print printing. And usually the customer will decide which printing they want because it depends on the complexity of the print. SoWhen a manufacturer receives the order, it'll basically just notate which type of printing they're interested in, and every manufacturer does a variety of things.

Some manufacturers do all printing, some manufacturers do only one type of printing. So I think it's not a product feature, it's just more of different types of manufacturers will have different printing capabilities, but the product itself will stay the same because that's more of an order management tool rather than specific to their printing style that they use. Okay. There's been some developments in the product that ThreadLabs is providing, right?

Just want to know about what kind of traction you guys are getting. So right now, how many shops are being onboarded piloting your services today, and what's the product or the value add that you guys are providing that they've said yes to primarily? Sure. Yeah, I think, so again, where ThreadLabs was before, we had about five shops that were piloting our stuff.

But since then, we've noticed that again, the direction we were initially headed in was not that useful necessarily as a software, more so than it was as a sourcing company, for new production opportunities, and that's not really the business we wanted to be in. So since then, we've sort of pivoted away from that and focused more on the operational software layer. And because of that, we have been developing the product for, I want to say like a month now. So we have not been very focused on sales at all.

But we just finished about a week ago and then started reaching out back to some different manufacturers that we thought would really benefit from something like this, which are not necessarily the smallest, low production manufacturers anymore. They're manufacturers who probably already have thought about implementing tech or have implemented tech, but it's not really helping their business in the way they thought they would. So again, manufacturers who have had, for example, like that Chinese manufacturer that has had an ERP system for 20 years, but now needs to keep up with AI trends in order to continue to be competitive in terms of how much they're producing at any given time. So because of that, we are now currently, it's been about a week or so of outreach and trying to set up meetings, so we have about two different manufacturers who are very interested in our new product, ready to pilot, probably within the next month or so.

That's the other thing is unfortunately, onboarding does take a while. The sales cycle can be a little long just because, it's not necessarily as simple of a product as we originally created. And now it's becoming more complex, you require a lot more hands-on work with specific customers. So that's kind of where we are now. But in the past we had produced an extra $50,000 and net new opportunities for different manufacturers.

We had five onboarded shops. So we know that tech is something that manufacturers definitely want. It's just more so of finding the right solution that's actually going to help their business, because that's all they care about is, is this increasing how much I'm producing on a weekly or monthly basis, essentially. Yeah. So from understanding, your customers are now mainly probably clubs and other things that's based on your, perhaps personal connections.

How do you plan to scale that customer and also, the manufacturer base up, in the future? Yeah. So, on the brand side, we're moving away from that. So clubs and all that, we're moving away from because again, that basically made us a sourcing agency- Mm-hmm ... which we didn't care to do. On the manufacturing side, some of our network is still very applicable for sure.

More mid-size manufacturers that we know domestically are going to be great to connect with and iterate on this product as we go. But past that, we really want to move in, not only want to sell to domestic manufacturers. We've had meetings, all of our meetings so far have been with international manufacturers for this new product. So we've noticed that it's not just domestic manufacturers that are demanding new tech.

Even those who already have tech are asking for it. So just being able to move into new markets is going to be important, moving into different countries where manufacturing is prevalent, like China or India. And not siloing ourselves off to one specific industry, which is apparel manufacturing, is also going to be very important because what's great about our product is there isn't a lot of... There's definitely white glove onboarding that is necessary, but you don't need to redesign the product every time you want to onboard a manufacturer that does something different, because they all generally experience very similar issues and may not have the exact same workflows, but their workflows are still similar because they're producing physical products.

So if we can-... quickly iterates on the smaller things, we can make a really, really well-tailored product in a very short amount of time for every manufacturer that we work with. Yeah, I think that sounds interesting because there's a lot of different industries who are doing the manufacturers, right? So you can expand into others maybe who are, I don't know, producing cars or producing electric products, right?

I'm not sure if that could be a potential future direction, yeah. Yeah. No, it definitely can. I think right now where we are at, it's still very much in the consumer goods, non-tech products sort of side of things, like jewelry or apparel. But we definitely see a future, and with the right strategic partners and the right people that we onboard, we will be able to move into these different verticals of manufacturing.

Okay. So moving our conversation a little bit more towards the people behind the company now, we want to talk about you two. Right. So you're a two-person founding team where Diora has manufacturing/product DNA, and you, Rylan, has- Three-person founding team. Oh, right, because- CTO, who's not here, yeah. Right. Never mind. But- You're good ... backtracking a little bit, so there's a CTO, Diora, who's in charge of manufacturing product, and you, Rylan, with finance and GTM.

So I think it's pretty well-rounded team with skillsets that complement each other, but just wanted to ask, do you guys still find skillset gaps? And if you do, how are you guys planning to fill it? Through recruitment or maybe advisors are helping it, et cetera? Yeah. I would say that at this point back, because again, we've gone back to square one when it comes to product, we are all working on different parts of the business.

It's not like one person is only designing product or only coding or only doing sales. Everybody's doing everything at this point. While we definitely have the majority of what needs to be done covered, there's just not enough hours in the day, to be quite honest, to get everything we want done, so at least just us three people. So we've definitely been utilizing AI agents to help us do a lot of these different things, like sales leads discovery, and even some small inbound batches of emails.

We like to do our outreach personally, not automated, just because we feel it's a bit more human. But we've definitely utilized AI in some of these different areas of our business, just because we need to be hyper-efficient because everybody else is. So if we do not keep up with the same sort of ability to produce good product and good sales, I guess you could call them sales discovery calls, like demos, we're just not going to be able to keep up with the competition. So being very efficient on that front is important to the team at this point.

Yeah, definitely. Have you thought of bringing new, I don't know, either interns or new members to your team? We have an intern, yeah. Oh, damn. Are you hiring now? Not outside of this team. Okay. I think we're at a point that we really, really like where we're headed, and we like where we are in our ability to produce at this point, and I think any more head count where we are right now would just make things difficult.

Yeah. Yeah. But I do think generally, I think we have a very diverse team. So going back to your original question, I do think that we have pretty much most of our bases covered. Rylan is obviously a finance student. He's super great at anything business model related. Dennis has scaled SaaS workflows from zero to one. I've had a lot of background in product and growth as well.

So we have a lot of experience across a lot of different bases, and to be honest with you, we don't have super defined and linear roles. Rylan works on product all the time. I work on sales all the time. It's very fluid, and I think that's what makes us work really well together. I think. Yeah, definitely. And talking about the ecosystem of USC, I think USC has been a great place and for students building something or doing their own startups.

And I remember you've been in the Techstars Catalyst program, in 2025. How does that experience look like? Does that help you forming your initial ideas and, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the Techstars Catalyst is sort of like a series of workshops, I would call it. So I think it doesn't necessarily help you with fundraising or anything like that. It's more of making sure that you're thinking about all the right things when you're starting your business.

So they'll go really deep into how do you narrow down your ICP, or how do you make sure that you are identifying good product market fit? How do you go about customer interviews? So they help guide you on all the fundamentals of running a strong business, because I think a lot of the founders who go into the cohort, they may not have an entrepreneurial training. And it just really helps lay those foundations, and you get to have this big network of people who have been affiliated with Techstars in the past and mentors that they provide.

So people take weekly calls with the mentor database that they provide as well, which is super, super helpful because there's people in so many different fields. So it's very much a supporting network, while you're building. Awesome. You guys are going through a very transformative and very fast-paced environment right now, right? Yeah. Just want to hear what you guys think of yourselves as beyond building and beyond being a founder, entrepreneur.

Could you describe yourself as one word outside of those, and why would you call yourself that? That's a good question. Let me think about this one. So one word outside of building is what you're saying? Yeah. And I don't know. I would say boring. Outside of building, probably very boring. Oh. I think the re- I'd give you more credit. I think the reason why is because I think outside of building, oh, man, I don't do much exciting stuff.

If I'm not building, I'm probably reading about building or listening to a podcast or something like that. I don't do a lot outside of just working on stuff, so probably boring. He lives and breathes this life. Unfortunately, yeah. I would probably- I think it's- Oh, yeah. Go for it. I wouldn't necessarily call it boring. You're contributing to transforming this area.

You could call yourself a pioneer, et cetera. Eventually, hopefully, that'll end up on my LinkedIn page somehow. Right now, we've got to work on the pioneering part. All right. I like pioneer. That's cool. How about you, Diora? I would probably say people-orientated. I don't know if there's one word for that, but I think everything that I've sort of done at USC and things that motivate me in general is building for people, and doing things that very much impact people positively.

Whether that's starting a club or running a club or setting up experiences, like startup career fair, and building companies like this, which is ultimately also aimed to help people get better access to manufacturing and help manufacturers become millionaires. I think that I have always been someone who really puts the people at the core of the problem, and really like to think about ways how to build infrastructure to help people at the end of the day. Ooh, okay. Dialing back to being a founder, what's some challenges you guys faced so far?

Was it related to, obviously, changing your product so much, or was it hiring your intern, or was it something else more personal? Hmm. This is a good question. I can give you my answer. Yeah. We do our girlfriends. I think that it's sort of been narrowing down on what specifically we want to solve, because I think we've had so many different ideas that are sort of in the same space, but we've been able to build a lot of different things that tackle the problem from different angles.

And for example, we can build tooling for brands, we can build tooling for manufacturers, we can build tooling for specifically apparel manufacturers, and we can make it an AI native platform versus something different. So, I think it's sort of we have so many ideas and so much that we've built, and it's sort of making that decision of what is the one specific thing, one specific feature that we want to focus on and take that forward. I think that's sort of something that has been definitely difficult, because when we look at a lot of different things, we're like, "Oh, this has so much potential. We should try this and see where it goes, if it works out." But then it's sort of taking away time from maybe something else that we feel is more scalable.

So I think sort of finding that balance has been definitely a challenge. Yeah, I would agree, honestly. Not scope creeping ourselves is very difficult, just because we're so nimble that if we see a problem, we think, "Okay, we have the capability to somehow solve this problem through what we're already building or create a feature or something that assists with this issue." And I think that it can be hard not to scope creep yourself just a bit. Just because, like I said, it's so easy.

So I think what we've done lately to sort of combat that is just going back to the basics and really thinking about at the most basic, what issues do manufacturers of this size face? What's the main issue? Because most of the issues that they're experiencing anyways that our product could fix if we decided to go down that route all stem from the same thing, which is they just have bad oversight, which leads to bad communication with customers, which leads to bad timelines, which leads to a ton of other issues like bad sales cycles or sales pipelines. So just, again, getting down to what it is that is the root of all that has been where our journey has led us, and I think we're finally at a place where we feel likeWe are solving the right problem at the right time and in the right way.

So, yeah. I'm glad you guys are reaching towards what you're exploring towards. Okay, so how's this thought exercises, taking on challenges, being nimble, changed aspects of your life? Like how you engage with others, approach new experiences, et cetera. Hmm. So what do you mean? So in other words, how has being a builder, a founder, an entrepreneur, changed your life in a way?

Yeah. I think there's just so many ways . It's hard to really pinpoint one. I think one I would say is your ability to live and thrive in uncertainty, because you never really know what's going to happen tomorrow. You never know if what you're going to build today is going to be the same thing that you're building next week. You need to be very fluid as a founder, and you need to be okay with knowing that everything can change every single day.

And I think that's something that is definitely an uncomfortable feeling, but I think that being a builder is you have to be okay with that, and it really trains you to be okay with that. Yeah. I agree. I think if I was not set on working on startups or being an operator in some capacity, I think life would be super boring, and I don't know that I could deal with that.

Or maybe working in VC would be fine, but yeah. I just feel like there's too much time on people's hands these days, that not utilizing that to build something you care about is kind of a waste of good time. So I think that entrepreneurship and building has taught me that life is a choose your own adventure sort of deal, and we don't need to treat it like there's one set path to having a good or fulfilling life. You don't have to be a consultant at EY to have a good, fulfilling life.

You can kind of choose your own adventure as you go. So that's, I think, what it's taught me. Yeah. Agree. Definitely. Yeah. I think you are your kind of warned founders ... to a certain degree. Yeah. And then we'll go for our last questions and kind of wrap up our episode today. So for other student founders who may feel early or uncertain about their own startups, what kind of suggestions do you want to give them?

And also, I remember that you have been talking to your mentors the last time when we go on a intro call, right? Yeah. How does mentorship kind of help you in building your own startups? Yeah. Yeah. I think that having advisors and mentors is super important, because I think being a founder is also a pretty lonely journey. Outside of your founding team, and maybe you're even a solo founder, it's very difficult because you're sort of living in this whole world in your head, and no one else sees it, or really knows about what you're doing every day.

So I think sort of being able to have people who are sort of more experienced or have some sort of knowledge in the space just to bounce ideas off of is extremely helpful. One of the advisors that we have is someone who basically was a fashion designer for his entire life, and he's dressed some incredible celebrities, and he has so many connections in manufacturing because he's produced his own line. So it's really awesome to talk to him, someone who's more on the creative side, who's speaking on behalf of brands, but then also talk to some of our other advisors, such as the founders of Ghost, who have that training from the tech side and the venture side, and how do you fundraise and build a venture scalable company? How do you sort of implement tech in a way that is genuinely helpful?

And sort of marrying those two different perspectives together, getting the designer perspective and the tech perspective and the fundraising perspective. It's just so interesting to see how many different ways different people think about a problem, and being able to use those into developing your own thesis on what you want to do and what you want to take forward. Because I think what many founders do fall into is sort of only living inside their own head. But I think where we've benefited is being able to branch out and have those diverse perspectives, which helps us to sort of zoom back and see it from the bigger picture.

Yeah. And I think Diora's answer was 100% correct. To touch on the second question you asked about advice for other student founders, I don't know how much of a position I am to give advice, but I'll do my best. I think we were lucky enough to be profitable and have a decent amount of traction in our sort of previous version of what our company was supposed to be.

But I think a lot of times students sort of struggle with that, rightly so, because they're creating something very new, pumping a lot of money into a new business. The idea may be venture scalable, but not profitable right away.But all of that to say, our paths look very different as student founders. There's no one right way to start a company in college. And even if you try starting a company and it doesn't work out, that's fine.

Doesn't mean you're a bad founder. I think that a lot of people are very hard and they're very hung up on raising money or being a profitable company or building who can implement AI in many different ways into one product as humanly possible. But I think what people need to, founders our age need to sort of focus on more is providing genuine value, and it doesn't have to be through AI, because that's not where genuine value comes from. Genuine value comes from solving an issue and solving it in the best possible way.

So my advice is go solve the issue without any tech or without any AI first. So, in our instance, right? The manufacturer wants more business, or they want more organization, go help them, bring them new deals, organize their pipeline, be essentially an assistant to some of these factories and get a better understanding of how they work on a day-to-day basis. And if you're solving any other issue, do the equivalent of that in your space, because everybody's path is different.

But what's going to give you the right direction on that path is going to be to deeply understand the issue from within, instead of trying to solve something with an AI product that nobody wants to use, is what I would say. Yeah, definitely. I think that wraps up our episode perfectly today, and thank you again for joining us, and wish you all the best in your startup journey. For sure.

It was a pleasure. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much for hosting.