Wunderkind CEO Josh Valman about how AI, niche supply chains, and chips with everything will change R&D and manufacturing forever.

When he was 10 years old, Josh Valman had a passion for robots. Today, he’s founder and CEO of a UK company, RPD International, that works with them – along with a global network of designers, engineers, and manufacturers. Before that, the serial entrepreneur founded two startups and, seven years ago, kicked off a successful consultancy career, running multi-million-dollar supply chains remotely for blue-chip corporations.

Nothing unusual there – thousands of boys play with robots and grow up to be successful businessmen. But for one startling fact: Valman is just 22 years old. Read his CV again, do the maths, and the implications are mind-blowing.

It started with a 10-year-old’s love for British TV show Robot Wars, in which teams design and build bots to do battle. At 13, Valman finally decided to have a go himself, but found he was too young for the main competition. So he taught himself to use Google’s SketchUp design app and entered the engineering part of the tournament, designing a robot and using his school’s metalwork lab to machine the components.

But he quickly discovered he needed to get them professionally made:

In the UK, factories didn’t want to talk to me: they didn’t think it was valid for a kid to come and use their machine shop, so they pointed me to China – as a joke. They were full of sarcasm and sent me on what they thought was a wild goose chase, but I found some Chinese factories and set up relationships there. We started making things, and everyone saw that what we were making – pneumatics, valves – was a step above what everyone else was doing.

Pretty soon, all these UK heads of engineering started saying to me: ‘Can you fix this?’ or, ‘Can you make these?’ And that turned into a consultancy career: I did two and a half years consulting for public companies. Until I got fired.Why was he fired? Simple, says Valman:

They found out how old I was.  

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