Assembly Ventures invests in early-stage companies changing how people, goods, data, and energy move. We take an international approach because the industrial base for this work is transatlantic.
Investing keeps me close to technologies while the company, market, standards, and surrounding ecosystem are still taking shape. Board work lets me help drive value.
The automotive industry was changing faster than the institutions that trained its workforce. Degree programs, employer hiring practices, workforce funding, and retraining programs were each solving a piece of the transition. They were not solving it together.
We co-developed a Master of Robotics degree with Wayne State University and convened an employer collaborative that brought CHROs from Ford, Bosch, and others around a shared reskilling problem.
The most important thing we built was not a curriculum. It was a way for institutions that owned different pieces of the transition to work on the same problem.
Public systems often inherit the consequences of private decisions years after those decisions were made.
Serving on Michigan's workforce board gave me the other side of a transition I had already been working on from industry and capital. The same change looks different when the question is not what can be built, but what happens to the people and institutions expected to absorb it.
That remains one of the most useful vantage points I have had.
The Henry Ford has an extraordinary collection. The question was what that collection could do for young people in Detroit deciding whether innovation belonged to people like them.
We built an immersive workforce experience around curiosity, empathy, collaboration, and tenacity, using the artifacts themselves to show that invention has always been messier, more human, and more iterative up close than it appears afterward.
Write to me about a company, a question, or a room you are organizing.