Judy Warner (00:01) Hi Valentina, appreciate you joining us today and it was great to see you last week at PCB West. Valentina (00:06) Hi, Judy, thanks for having me. Excited to chat with you today. Judy Warner (00:10) Me too. So it's been several years since we talked and when I ran it across you at PCB West, you guys have come so far and I knew that our listeners would want to hear from you. So why don't you start by giving us a brief intro, your educational and professional background, and then tell us a little bit about Allspice. Valentina (00:31) Totally, absolutely. So I am a mechanical engineer by training. And after college, I worked at Amazon in infrastructure projects behind e-commerce. So think of all the robots, the machinery, the warehouses, logistics that move packages to people's homes. That's what I worked on. It was a really exciting time. It was very fast growing capacity for Amazon at that point. I worked in lot of different projects across different states. And as part of that, as we were building this infrastructure projects, we started to run into a lot of the, call it challenges of building physical products. And as part of that, I started working with an internal software team to build their own productivity and collaboration layer, which is what interests me into working at this intersection between software and hardware. It was an, I opened an experience for me because I got to see how much of an impact having tooling that was dedicated for us made into helping us building these projects faster, the quality was up, the errors were down. And at the same time, I got to see how software products are built and what that ecosystem looks like. And left myself wondering. why this is a success for building software products and have more support and a better ecosystem of GitHub and Jira tickets and all these things to build this tool than I do to actually have my hardware projects completed. So I decided to go back to grad school and work at this intersection of software and hardware worlds. And that's where I met Kyle, my co-founder. Judy Warner (02:21) So tell us about, so you were doing MBA, right, at Harvard, and then I believe you guys were put on a project. Can you tell us a little bit about that, how you two came together? Valentina (02:33) Yeah, so I joined the dual degree program at Harvard. It's an MS MBA. So we were doing an MBA at the business school and an MS at the engineering school, which was focused for us mostly around computer science. And this was a small cohort that was part of the larger class. It was a group of 28 students. And both Kyle and I were in the same kind of dual degree cohort. And we actually met in our first class together because our professor, call it fate or destiny, just put us to work together in this systems engineering class. And we kind of started there and started sharing a lot of our experiences coming from the hardware girl, Kyle's an electrical engineer by training and how to work their startups and had managed hardware teams and had managed software teams. And we talked about, like our software teams are running in this GitLab and running pull requests and And then we go to the hardware team and there's a lot of post-it notes and PDFs and screenshots and email threads with hundreds of people. So we kind of like started talking about what those pain points were and what we wanted the industry to actually look like. And we're both super passionate about hardware products in general. And I think it's super exciting how there is a lot of innovation happening in the space. There's rockets and there's like all this kind of infrastructure from autonomous vehicles to micro medical devices and, everything in between. And we're trying to build colonies in Mars and a lot of the systems and the tools that the engineers have to get us there are still pretty old school. So we kind of got together and we started to think about kind of how can we enable that next generation of hardware products to, actually become a reality. Judy Warner (04:25) Well, there's one that's been around the industry for a long time, Valentina, we need you and Kyle. I promise you we need it. and that was something really refreshing that I saw at PCBWES is, you know, there's at least five, six companies there where you're all using software or AI to, you know, make the workflow and use these tools that are similar to software and in other ways we do some, do. Valentina (04:32) Thank Judy Warner (04:54) this hardware development. So let's talk about the practicality. Like what are the pieces that makes Allspice interesting? I know you lean into Git quite a bit, but what does that mean, Git power development? like what would a day-to-day application using a tool like Git look like as opposed to how we're doing it now? Valentina (05:22) That's a great question. One of the things we realized when we were thinking about, and I were getting started, we were thinking about, okay, if we know that the current PDF Smith's Post-it Notes is not the solution, right? What does the right solution actually look like? And just kind of thinking it from an endless possibilities approach, we kind of thought about, okay, what are the pieces that we need? And From both of our experiences, we gravitated towards looking at software solutions as a comparable point. And that happened because a lot of the hardware teams nowadays, hardware today is a lot more software integrated than it was five or 10 years ago. Think of a traditional hardware product like a car. Right now it's an incredibly sophisticated software product just as much. That maybe wasn't the case like not long ago. Judy Warner (06:11) you bet. Valentina (06:20) So all of the hardware products are becoming very, very integrated with software products. So these teams are becoming more and more integrated as well. So you have hardware teams working parallel with software teams. And the software teams have, for a lot of good reasons or not, they figured out how to work together more efficiently. And there's been this rise on exponential growth and tooling available for developers building software products over the past decade or two. that has accelerated that development at an incredible rate. And so when we thought about, how do we actually build something that's going to help these teams also operate in a similar way, we decided to align with those software counterparts. Because we believe the successful Harvard companies of today and of the future are going to be the ones that can build integrative products. of hardware and software that work together really, really well. And if the software industry is working and operating this way, and we can agree, and we can discuss the advantages or disadvantages, but we can all agree that Git is one of the industry standards in that space. So if the software world is in Git, we can come up with a new system for the hardware team, or we can enable this technology and these kind of principles that apply in the software space and make them work for the hardware counterparts. Judy Warner (07:21) Mm-hmm. Valentina (07:47) And we've seen that naturally happening over time as well. Like every new hardware designer or hardware engineer that comes out of college is also a part-time software developer. You learn how to code in school and it may be 5 % of your time to automate certain tasks or dashboards, or it could be 80 % of your time when you're writing firmware. This is something that a lot of our engineers are already familiar with. It's something that it's an industry standard in the software world. And it's something that it's kind of a skill that it's become more more common. So we built Allspice to be founded on this Git or software principles. And what we do is we actually take that. And if you're a hardware engineer, if you go and just sign up for GitHub or GitLab, those are great tools. You probably get... 10 to 20 % of the experience a software developer may get in the same tool, right? Just because the inputs that you're putting in or the designs that you're doing are 2D, 3D drawings, bill of materials, PCB schematics, instead of text-based code. So what we wanted to do is say, okay, if we keep the principles, right? The principles of like iterating, moving faster, collaborating, an open ecosystem that's interconnected, flexibility and the scalability. Judy Warner (08:47) Okay. Valentina (09:11) But how do we apply that to the hardware space? So the way this looks like in Allspice is we have a Git-based revision control system that enables users to keep track of their history and records. But we built a visualization layer on top of that that enables you to see and interact with your designs the way that you're used to. So when you look at a schematic, you're looking at an actual schematic rather than a bunch of code that may not mean anything to you. Judy Warner (09:34) Mm-hmm. Right, okay. So you converted that into something that looks familiar, but in the backend it's code and it's using the power of that code. Valentina (09:54) Yeah. So one of the first things we actually built for Allspice was our, dev engine, is until today, one of our users favorite features and is this functionality that's ubiquitous in the software world. Where you're talking about what's being changed since my last version and the new version, right? Like you're doing a review at a point in time. So can you tell the difference between what's new and what's not? Judy Warner (10:16) Mm-hmm. Valentina (10:22) And traditionally in the hardware world, that's been a little bit of a game of playing Waldo, putting two schematics side by side, or trying to do like cradle scale, like overlays, like people printing them and highlighting them. I've seen everything from that all the way to rocket scientists, like pulling up images and pointing with their fingers on the screen and everything in between, right? So the first thing we actually built was this Def Engine, which allows you to compare two schematics or two circuit boards. to PCBs and tell you what's different, right? Can we show it in a way that's intuitive for the user and we color code and grade everything that's been, that's remained the same and we color code green, things have been added, red things have been removed, yellow thing that's been modified and kind of that ability of clearly see your design changes. It's been incredibly helpful and powerful for engineers just to kind of automate something that. Judy Warner (10:59) Mm-hmm. Valentina (11:17) either before it didn't have access to, or they would have taken them a very long time. Sometimes this designs, it could be weeks to months. if you're trying to remember what's the reason why, or what did I change, how did I move, what capacitors I moved three months ago, it's very unlikely that you're going to be able to track all of that. But software can, right? So that's where we want to come in and help. Judy Warner (11:40) Love it. So another thing I think you mentioned to me is a functionality I thought is interesting as one again has been in industry for a while is the ways that Allspice handles something like the difference between traditional and the way Allspice handles design reviews. Tell us about that. Valentina (11:43) Thank Yeah, I feel like as a hardware engineer, everyone's been in one of those in their career where you have to schedule a meeting three weeks in advance, you got to get everyone's calendar open, you get a room, you get everyone together, you project things in a screen and you take notes and these processes are, I would say, very time consuming. And also at the same time, there's a lot of information that gets lost in that process. it's very rare that you capture every single comment that's made or that you follow through on every single action items. Then there's this spreadsheet of issues that you have to follow up on. And it's unclear sometimes when you close the loop versus when you don't. So that kind of ad hoc process and different companies may look different, right? Like we did hundreds of interviews with engineers and it may look like a Google Sheet presentation template or it may look like confluence page or it may look like an email thread or it may look like a spreadsheet, right? But kind of that version of a general purpose tool. It's one of the things that our users appreciate the most in Allspice. Like the way we run design reviews in Allspice is emulating what the pull requests or the merge requests in the software world look like. a design review in Allspice, you open it up and the first thing it does for you is it will automatically generate these red line packages. that will tell you exactly all the changes that happen in your design. It will color code them for you. And it will generate this kind of visual and interactive and live version of the deltas in your design. You can add your coworkers. You can decide to set approvers. And it's very customizable. That's one of the other principles in software, where we try to build functionality in a way that not, we're not being prescriptive. So I will say every, every, every customer that we have kind of adapts the process to fit their own needs. And every company runs design reviews a slightly different way, right? So what we try to do is some of them require approval. Some of them don't, some of them require two or three or four or different teams. And you can kind of set all these things to, fit your needs and have a nice synchronous collaboration happening. before, sometimes people will layer an in-person meeting, sometimes you will just do everything kind of digitally. And then you basically capture all that intent as you go and it's recorded with your design history. This is super helpful for teams when you're talking about traceability, visibility, troubleshooting down the road and things like that. It's just kind of having that record and that point in time of all of the decisions that you made, where you close the loop. what got pushed up to the next review, to the next release, and kind of how did you move that design forward that you can always go back and take a look at whenever you need it. Judy Warner (15:04) You and I, Valentina, we met back when I was at Altium and I remember you guys were coming out with Allspice right around the time COVID hit. And I remember that because Altium 365 was coming out at the same time. And for the customers at Altium, I know that being able to work in the cloud and work collaboratively and track, you know, those features. It was like life rafts when the world shut down and people couldn't have those in-person design reviews. What do you think, how do you think sort of the timeframe in which you launched, which is in 2020 originally when you first began developing the tool, I believe, what do you think the impact of COVID had on moving us to work more effectively like this and collaboratively in sight of software engines and tools that helped us to do that as hardware engineers. Valentina (16:10) Yeah, I think there's been a variety of trends that have accelerated what I will say the need for better digital infrastructure for hardware teams. And maybe one of the most notable ones was COVID and in more in general, the what I will call shift to distributed teams based on how we develop electronics is very rare that a company may have. all the way from their schematics to their manufacturing in the same building, right? So most of the time you're working with a distributed co-located team anyway, where you may have people across the world doing different functions. And that's really hard to do when you're kind of counting on getting together in person, then you don't have a good kind of digital threat of like this design decisions that you're making along the way. The other trend that I think shed a lot of light into the problems that we had here was the cheap supply shortage that I think a lot of people in our space kind of knew that this was an issue, but as an outsider, maybe you didn't realize, but that kind of put it on center stage for the world to see basically what can happen when things go wrong and like how much of an impact this type of things can have in like everyone's day to day life. So I think like there's been a lot of different things that have been pushing that and then Judy Warner (17:20) Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Valentina (17:31) The other one is as well that teams, we, I know we know a lot of this, actually just run a series of surveys and collected insights from thousands of engineers and in product development in hardware has shifted in the past few years. And we've gone from two to four year timelines to Judy Warner (17:45) Wow. Valentina (17:56) 18 to 36 month timelines, and sometimes even 12 timelines. And people are doing maybe more iterations that were before. So you are required to do, and hybrid products are more complex. There's more pieces, there's more sensors, there's more electronics. Everything has a Bluetooth module and all these things. So more complex products, shorter timelines, more budget conscious with the same tooling underlying. So it's like, we're kind of trying to do so much more with the same things. And this is kind of putting a lot of pressure on these teams. to accelerate these timelines, it's like you kind of have to find efficiencies somewhere to kind of help you meet those needs. So, but I think it's really exciting because there's huge investment in the hardware space. And I get really excited to see, like I live in San Francisco and like, I'm super pumped to see the way I'm also driving around, right? And like getting people from point A to point B without a driver. And those are the type of things that... Judy Warner (18:34) Yeah, absolutely. I do too. Valentina (18:52) kind of hardware development can unlock, right? And the more investment and development that goes into that, the more we're going to live in that world. Judy Warner (18:59) It is an exciting time. And I agree with you that those awful pains that hit us all unexpectedly moved us forward. also put engineers in a bit of, like you said, more, faster, better. But it is creating companies like Allspice and it's creating, there's investment available too, which is really exciting. Now I've heard you say a couple of times during this conversation that One, you said you did a large scale survey, but I also heard you talk about as you've been developing the tools, you've tapped the EE community to work with them collaboratively to create basically the tool you all want to have. So tell us about that and how that back and forth is and what the feedback is you're getting along the way. Valentina (19:51) That is so important to us. We are a company of engineers and Allspice is a product made by engineers for engineers. So we put kind of the developer experience or the engineer experience front and center. And I think some of the things that we've learned and some of the, maybe the values that we have is we believe that we can create this. enterprise value or this company value by giving the engineers superpowers. You don't need to have software that you work for. So someone three layers above you can get insights. But if we give you superpowers, you're going to be so much more efficient that your entire company is going to benefit from that. So we kind of approach Allspice from a perspective of making kind of creating that value, starting with the engineers experience. Judy Warner (20:22) Mm. I love that. I think it's a place I try to advocate for because I think what you're saying is when the engineers have a superpower, the whole stream improves, right? It's kind of the ground zero of where the important work happens. So if you can make that part better, it has such massive downstream effects that, you know, it's only Valentina (20:58) Hmm. Judy Warner (21:13) good news for engineers, for your company, for the industry. that's a win all the way around. So that is very exciting. Valentina (21:17) Mmm. Totally. And I think for the engineers, there are certain kind of functionality or principles that they value a lot. Like one of them, for example, is flexibility and the ability to not, for us not to be prescriptive, but kind of giving them the tools to build their own process the best way possible. Judy Warner (21:42) Mm-hmm. Yep. Valentina (21:44) And I like to use maybe the Lego analogy here. And I try to describe all Spice and our processes as a Lego set. And maybe we can even give it to you assembled. So you don't have to put it together from scratch. But at the end of the day, if you want to move this piece from here to there, that customization is a lot of what our teams look for and value. Because every engineer brings their own preferences and best practices from their own experience. And that's things like being e-cad agnostic and being able to kind of Judy Warner (22:08) Mm-hmm. Valentina (22:12) whatever tools you're using, like connecting to the rest of the ecosystem and enabling kind of a open data flow with like best in class solutions. we know what we're not going to be able to do every single piece of analysis on our design. kind of making it easy for engineers to kind of connect the data from A to B so that they can get the insights inside of their workflow whenever it's helpful. If you, one of the typical examples we hear is like, supply chain insights or visibility and how the traditional process will be you go through the design and then you get it quoted a month later. Maybe it's too high, right? And it's like, okay, now you got to go and do a month of work and redesign something, right? But maybe, is there an easy way to do this as you go? Or is this something that you're spending so much time into that you're not getting value out of it? So kind of like giving the engineers the information and the insights from the sources they need or they want. Judy Warner (22:44) Mm-hmm. Valentina (23:11) of the time that they need it the most. Judy Warner (23:14) I was kind of blown away because I know almost nothing about software. Only, you know, I've been around it, but I've had no personal experience with it. But it was kind of blown away, Valentina, when I went to your website and saw how many software tools your tool can integrate with. why don't you name drop some of the integration that LSPICE plays nice with? Valentina (23:37) Mm hmm. Yeah, so that's a question. There's kind of different types of tools that engineers use for the day to day. So you have the ECA tooling, right? So that's one of the of categories. We have variety of webhooks as well that kind of help engineers plug into their day-to-day ecosystem or workflows. So those will be things like Slack and Microsoft Teams and Jira and all this kind of more broader company tools. one of my favorite features is our Slack bot, for example, that every time someone comments or tags me in a design review, I'll get a Slack notification and kind of things like that being able to plug in into your day-to-day already workflow. I think it's very important. Judy Warner (24:20) Yeah, especially that one. Like you get a heads up, you don't have to wait for an email or whatever it is. So that's a fun one. As far as EE speaking to Trolli, I you to talk about that a little bit more like what have they told you and what are they excited about? But then I'm also really interested to hear about the survey you did and what you learned from it. Valentina (24:44) Yes, good question. So from our conversations, will say basically everything in our roadmap is inspired, right, and driven by what we hear from our customers. But some of the trends that we've heard over the last few months, especially have been around collaboration, which is actually kind of ties to our survey. When we run the survey, we ask teams and engineers what's been the skill that's helped them to be the most successful. And about half of them said collaboration and communication because the systems are so interconnected and there's so many different stakeholders coming together. It kind of makes sense, but that's one of the areas where helping different stakeholders come together is very, important for them. The other one is automation. That's another. Judy Warner (25:17) Mm-hmm. Valentina (25:34) area where we hear a lot of like, you help us like, instead of taking 10 minutes every day to do X, can you just do it automatically instead of taking an hour to do this every week, can you just do it automatically? And we do that through actions in Allspice. And when we run the survey, we ask engineers, for example, how much time you spend troubleshooting. And the average engineer in a survey spends about six hours per week troubleshooting. That's a lot of time for something that's supposed to be working. And I think to myself, like, well, imagine if you had an extra 300 hours per year, right? Like, what would you be able to do? And those are the type of things which is like, okay, for spending all this time is going in here is like, this is where you kind of want help like automating those tasks, especially for things that are repetitive, especially for things that are kind of a known solution. And we think that the engineers are best at the creative. design work and things that already have been solved and it's a series of clicks in a row, like that can be automated, right? But the kind of the creative, like zero to one, I think it's where engineers shine. it's like, if we can unlock more of your time and focus to work there rather than the other things, that's kind of I want to do with Allspice. Judy Warner (26:31) 100%. Yeah, it's a waste of her time. And that's where I really resonate with your message that you really are giving them a superpower when you give them that much time back or automating things that are repetitive and boring and they're not using, using all that creativity and that skill that made them want to be an engineer. then doing bombs on spreadsheet makes them want to not be an engineer, right? Or whatever it is. So I love it. Valentina (27:18) Yeah, exactly. We do hear that consistently, like design or kind of that again creative aspect is engineers, like a lot of the times are their favorite part of the job. Judy Warner (27:29) Right. And again, what I love about it is that you're, what is that going to do for the industry? What's it going to do? Yeah. We're going to put communities on Mars. So if we have engineers able to spend more of that time in a creative space, like you said, get 300 more hours a year times X amount of engineers, it's exciting to think. what we might be able to do as a society. Valentina (28:00) Yeah, that could be the difference of like decades of getting there earlier, right? And that could be the difference of like us being able to see it and leave it versus not. So I think all of these things have an impact, especially when you kind of aggregate across all the engineers across like years of time is like it makes just takes a few degrees to kind of tilt the curve and completely accelerate kind of how we build that new world. Judy Warner (28:04) decades. Right. I love it. Very exciting. Well, Valentina, first I got to say congratulations. You and Kyle and your team have done amazing work and I can't believe how far you've come since the first time we met. And it's very exciting to see what you're doing. Before I let you go, I'd be really interested to share with our audience if you have it, what that survey was that you did. Do you have that available? And where would you like our audience to go to learn more about Allspice besides say their homepage? Valentina (28:59) Yeah, so we did package all of the insights and the results from our survey. It's available as our 2025 State of Hardware ebook. You can get it on our website, allspiceio-stateofhardware. And it contains a lot of interesting kind of questions and tidbits. And besides the ones that we talked today, also asked teams, for example, like what types of version control they're using and what percentage are in one versus the other. What are some of the main challenges that we've faced over the past year? How do they think that the software, hardware from our teams are working together over time, better or worse? So there's a lot of good insights there. And if you're interested, you can kind of get it from our website. And then to learn more about Allspice, our website is allspice.io. And if you want to see it in action and get a recorded demo or something that's kind of an overview, I know as engineers like Pictures are worth a thousand words, so just kind of like seeing it for yourself. You can go to allspice.io slash interested and you can request a walkthrough and a video of whatever you're interested in seeing. Judy Warner (29:59) Mm-hmm. Yay, you just saved them from another meeting. So that's great, good for you. Well, I will definitely, I think your colleague Robert sent some of those links over, but I'll sort through them and make sure I put them below in the show notes. So Valentina, again, congratulations. It's been so great to catch up and see all the exciting work you're doing. And by the way, for my audience, I'm just gonna tell you, I went and looked at their website before recording. Valentina (30:13) Yeah, so. Judy Warner (30:38) And the price point is ridiculously affordable. Can I just say that? So you get engineering superpowers for an amazing price point with lots of functionality. So there's my little personal pitch. Valentina (30:50) Amazing. Yeah. I know, especially a few years in startup world, it's more like a century. So feel like so much has changed and we've grown so much over the past few years. And now we have all customers from startups to Fortune 500s. And it's just been incredible to see. And I think it speaks to the kind of appetite in the industry and the space for kind of ways to enable these engineers to do what they do best, even better. Judy Warner (30:57) you Well, your passion is infectious and I love hearing your story and hearing all you're doing. So thank you again. And I hope you'll come back soon and catch us up because I know you're still running a hundred miles an hour with your team and bringing out new features and getting further down the road. So thanks for joining again and hope we can do it again soon. Valentina (31:40) Thank you for having me, Jodi. It was a pleasure to be here today. I really appreciate it. Judy Warner (31:44) For our listeners, thanks so much for joining us today. I trust you really enjoyed this conversation with Valentina. We will see you next week. Make sure you go check out the show notes. I'll get those links from Valentina and be sure to check them out. You'll be really glad you did. We will see you next week. Until then, remember to always stay connected to the ecosystem. Boom, music out, outro, roll.