NC Tweener Talks

Adam Steege, founder and CEO of Trio Labs, joins me to talk about building a company that 3D prints tiny, complex metal parts for medical devices out of Morrisville, North Carolina. The conversation covers Adam's path from a failed first startup in laparoscopic surgical devices to founding Trio Labs in 2015, the five years it took to reach bench-scale proof of concept, and the road from Series A funding in 2021 to commercial launch in 2023. Adam explains why his first company stalled, the manufacturing gap between traditional machining and semiconductor-style nanofabrication that Trio Labs fills, and why the company chose to sell finished parts rather than printing equipment. What makes this episode distinctive is how directly Adam connects his first company's failure to the thesis behind his second, along with a clear, first-principles explanation of why metal 3D printing at this precision is so difficult that Trio Labs describes itself as half ASML, half TSMC. It's a grounded look at what it actually takes to build a hardware company over more than a decade.

Timestamps
00:00 Cold open & sponsor thanks
01:15 Welcome to NC Tweener Talks
01:35 Scot's intro: Adam Steege & Trio Labs
02:25 Interview begins
02:50 Guest welcome
02:55 NC Tweener Fund's investment history with Trio Labs
03:30 Adam's origin story begins
04:00 Growing up in NC, Carleton & Columbia
04:55 Why med tech pulled him in
05:40 The genesis of the Trio Labs idea
06:10 Technical founder staying on as CEO
08:10 What happened to the first company
09:05 The "stakeholder visibility mismatch"
11:20 From the first company's ashes to Trio Labs
13:15 Trio Labs' basic pitch
13:50 Why minimally invasive devices keep getting smaller
16:10 The manufacturing gap Trio Labs fills
18:05 Founding timeline: 2015 to Series A to commercial launch
20:00 Gen 1 to gen 3: iterating the printer
22:05 The "third dimension is nonlinear" analogy
24:00 "Half ASML, half TSMC"
25:05 Why metal instead of plastic
28:50 Facility tour: the machines, wafer fab in a box
30:05 The parts Trio Labs makes: robotics & endovascular
31:40 Where Trio Labs is in its scaling journey
34:50 Staying focused on med tech
37:35 Why they don't sell machines
40:05 Where to find Trio Labs
40:35 Wrap and credits


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Where to Find Adam Steege:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-t-c-steege-814b6821/
Trio Labs: https://triolabs.com

Where to Find Scot Wingo:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thescotwingo/
Tweener Times: https://www.tweenertimes.com/
X: https://x.com/scotwingo

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This episode of Triangle Tweener Talks is hosted by Scot Wingo, presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund, with creative assets and design support from Walk West. 

We couldn’t share posts like this without our amazing sponsors: 

Platinum: 
NC IDEA: https://ncidea.org

Gold Sponsors: 
- Balentine: https://www.balentine.com/triangle-entrepreneurs 
- EisnerAmpner: https://www.eisneramper.com 
- Robinson Bradshaw: https://www.robinsonbradshaw.com 
 
Silver Sponsors: 
- Automated Consulting Group: https://automated.co 
- Bank of America: https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/technology-industry-group.html 

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Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by: