Sam D'Amico
On Volts
“Shenzhen is turning into this, what I would call a matter compiler. It's like, okay, cool. You can almost vibe code out hardware just by asking for it. We're getting the Star Trek replicator, it just happens to be a city.”
Volts · Climate & Energy · October 2026
D'Amico, a hardware founder, explains why he tells other founders to go prototype in Shenzhen. There, three phone calls get you 20 suppliers, and a prototype is already built in the same ecosystem that will make the final product.
Transcript
…phone calls gets you, you know, 20 suppliers. Yeah. And like things can get driven between and like things are all the driving distance and like prototyping goes way faster. I've been talking to founders who are like, I'm just going to spend two months in Shen Shen just get the first prototype out.
Did you go through this with Impulse? Yeah,
yeah, yeah. Well, so we had a fun part where we started the company in 2021. You couldn't really go to China until 2023, but I basically spent a huge amount of time getting stuff up and running. And now we've got, you know, they'll just kind of scale to arbitrary volumes, you know, mostly downstream or just tappable in terms of like pre-ordering parts and stuff like that. But we were a little bit early to go to the second wave of this. But like if you're some founder trying to build some like AI doodad or whatever, or a robot or whatever, it's like, this is clearly the path to getting you prototype faster. The difference too is because you're prototyping in the production ecosystem, you're kind of like what I would call like playing for keeps, where effectively if the decisions you make, if they're made and applied to like a Chengden production line, it's like, well, those will scale to your final product versus if you go and prototype in the US with like MeMasterCar on that hardware store or whatever…
This gets to my question. Let's cut to the chase then, because like standing up a manufacturing ecosystem of the scale and skill that China has built honestly strikes me and I think a lot of people as basically fantastical. We're pretty far down the road of being a service economy. A lot of things…
I think the reality is it's like, it's not that many discrete things we have to get good at. And we're honestly still pretty good at most of these things. Like the automotive industry provides us enough backstop scale, like our existing automotive metrics provides enough existing backstop scale…
And not just that, but like, do we need also to be digging the minerals out of the ground? Do we need to be doing initial processing of the minerals into materials that go into these pieces of the electric stack? Like how much of the China has like so comprehensively grabbed a hold of all this.…
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