I'm Kevin Chou. I started Kabam and ran it for eleven years, then Bright Saver, the nonprofit behind the push to legalise plug-in solar. Bright Saver Industries carries the American side for overseas hardware makers: the manufacturing, the data and key custody layer, and the government filings that come with both.
All four of these are the first hire on their line. Two are senior operating seats, one is commercial, and one is for somebody near the start of a career.
What we build. Final assembly in the United States of small solar microinverters and integrated plug-in battery and inverter products, under a manufacturing licence from a foreign designer. We buy the parts, we own the finished goods, we sell finished units. This is not contract assembly. It's a regulatory programme business that manufactures, and the compliance position is made of purchase orders.
Advanced robotic devices and power inverters went onto the Covered List first, and more categories are coming. Each one is a list of products that has to be built in America to stay on the market, and a list of manufacturers who mostly can't solve that alone. Nearly all of them are in Greater China.
Your job is to find them and build the programmes.
Map a category and work out who's exposed and what the volumes are. Get to the person who actually decides, which is usually a founder in China and not the United States general manager. Build the commercial case on both sides. Structure the agreement, working with our counsel rather than instead of them. Run the diligence and write me the memo that says plainly whether I should do it.
I'll be in the room with you. I'm not handing you a lane.
1. Negotiation-grade Mandarin, alongside English. The counterparties negotiate in Mandarin and their documentation is in Mandarin, and the English speaker at the United States subsidiary usually can't decide the thing you're discussing. Contract language, component specifications, price. Not pleasantries. I'll test it on the call.
2. You've worked closed deals, and this won't be your first. Corporate development, business development, or a transaction seat in investment banking, private equity or strategy consulting. It counts the same whether you did it before your Master of Business Administration, after it, or both. If you spent two years on a banking desk and just finished the degree, you're who I mean.
Walk me through a deal you worked on, start to finish. What was your part of it, and what nearly killed it? Then tell me the same story again in Mandarin.
Palo Alto, in person, with me. The travel is frequent and mostly Asia. If you're exceptional and you're somewhere else, write to me anyway and tell me what you'd need. Base is band on request, and I'll give you the range on the first call.
I can support it, including sponsorship. Tell me your situation in your application and we'll work it out.
Write to Kevin@BrightSaverIndustries.com and tell me about one deal you worked on. Which deal, what you personally did on it, and what nearly killed it.
Two organisations will help me build this product. The licensor's design engineers want the transfer to work. The contract manufacturer's new product introduction team wants the line running. Both are good at their jobs.
Neither one is paid to protect my landed cost or my supplier content ratio. The licensor would rather sell me parts from its own supply base. The contract manufacturer would rather substitute a part at 2am on a Friday than let a line go down. Both of those are rational for them. I buy the parts and I own the finished goods, so line down is my fault, excess inventory is my cash, yield loss burns parts I already paid for, and one unauthorised substitution to a producer controlled from the wrong place quietly breaks a federal position worth more per unit than my assembly labour.
This is the only seat at the table where nobody else's incentive covers me.
The bill of materials, as the party paying for it. Not as a planner and not as a category manager inside someone else's organisation. You approve every line, you know what it costs delivered, and you know who actually made it.
The content ratio, as a number a federal reviewer can audit. Our customers' applications turn on a domestic end product test: manufactured in the United States, more than 65 percent of component cost mined, produced or manufactured here, rising to 75 percent from 2029, at 48 CFR 25.101(a). Country of origin on a customs form does not answer that question. It has to be evidenced by supplier certification, signed and retained, with penalties for getting it wrong. And no franchised distributor sells to an origin specification: Avnet says in writing it cannot accept orders specifying origin, and DigiKey warns its origin data changes without notice. The document doesn't exist as a product. You negotiate it, line by line, with the people who actually make the parts.
Approved vendor list control, in our name. No substitution without written approval, on any line, including under allocation. You'll help write that clause and then enforce it against people who push.
Should-cost and teardown. The licensor designed this product and knows its cost better than I do. I need to know it too.
The data under the filing. Full bill of materials, country of origin per component, every sole-source supplier and its country, contingency plans, and supply chain concentration by country as a percentage of both value and volume. There is no confidentiality provision in the guidance, which is a real problem and one you'll help me solve with counsel rather than carry on your own. You build the data and you make sure it's true. I sign it.
Tell me about a country-of-origin re-sourcing programme you ran yourself on an electronics product, and what landed cost did while you ran it. Not managed someone who ran it. Ran it, and can name the parts, the alternates, the qualification path and what it cost.
Not looking for a certification body or test laboratory background; a radio, firmware or embedded background; a business development background; or a vice president who manages managers.
Palo Alto to start. The assembly site isn't fixed yet between Texas and California, and I'll settle it around the person and the line, in that order. Once production starts you're on the floor most weeks, plus travel to the licensor's engineers and to suppliers. Tell me in your first email what a move would mean for you and I'll be straight about the timing.
Write to Kevin@BrightSaverIndustries.com and tell me about one part you moved out of one country and into another. Which part, what the alternate was, and what landed cost did.
Advanced robotic devices went onto the Covered List the same day as power inverters, in the same public notice, with the same deadline. That reaches most of the robots Americans actually buy: vacuums and mowers, restaurant and hotel service robots, warehouse mobile robots, humanoids and quadrupeds. I'm opening that line and I need one person to help me build it.
Map the manufacturers, their products, and where the real opportunity is. Read the hardware properly: what's inside these machines, what the radios and sensors do, what would have to change to build a version here. Work in Mandarin and English with manufacturers, suppliers and partners. Then help deliver the programmes we sign.
I care as much about how you think as what you've done. I want someone who takes a robot apart to see how it was built, reads a datasheet out of curiosity, and has an opinion about why a design choice was made. Electronics, mechanics, software. You don't have to be deep in all three, but you have to be interested in all three, because this work sits across them.
We'll do the manufacturer outreach together, build the programmes together, and work out the software strategy together. I'm not looking for someone to hand a lane to.
1. Professional Mandarin, alongside English. Half this job is technical conversation with Chinese manufacturers. Component specifications, engineering constraints, negotiation. Not pleasantries. I'll test it on the call, in Mandarin, on technical vocabulary.
2. You've built robots and you can't stop talking about it. A university robotics team, ARC Robotics (formerly RoboMaster North America), FIRST, VEX, RoboCup, Formula SAE Electric, a rover or underwater vehicle team, BattleBots, or something you built on your own that actually worked. An engineering degree, or one in progress. Zero to five years out.
Your cover letter. Which school you went to, mostly. Whether you've done this exact job before, because nobody has.
I'll hire a current student part time during term, paid, on real work. That's a separate arrangement, not this seat.
I can support it, including sponsorship. Tell me your situation in your application and we'll work it out.
Send your resume and answers to Kevin@BrightSaverIndustries.com. A few sentences each is plenty.
1. What's the most interesting robot you've built or taken apart, and what surprised you about it?
2. If it were your call, which category would you go after first, and why? Vacuums and mowers, warehouse and logistics, restaurant and hotel service, humanoids and quadrupeds, or something I haven't listed.
I read those before the resume and they count for more.
You own whether this product can be built here at all.
A mature product designed for one factory does not simply arrive at another. The schematic travels. The bill of materials travels. The mechanical drawings travel. What doesn't travel is everything that makes the yield: test coverage assumptions, the fixtures, the process window on the reflow profile, what's in the head of whoever runs the rework cell, and the reason the original team picked a part they never wrote down.
There's a version of this job where the licensor's engineers hand us a package, we build it, and it works. That version doesn't exist. The real one has somebody sitting between their design team and our line, translating, arguing, testing, and refusing to sign off on a first article that isn't right.
First-pass yield is an owned number or it's nobody's number. Today it's nobody's.
The transfer. You're the technical counterpart to the licensor's engineering team, and you'll spend real time in their building. You'll ask for things they never wrote down. You're the person who notices what's missing from the package before it costs us a quarter.
Design for manufacturability, as an argument rather than an edit. You don't own the design and you won't be given it to change. When a placement, a connector, a conformal coating boundary or a test point set makes the product expensive or unrepeatable on a North American line, you make the case, with data, to people who have shipped millions of these their way.
Test strategy, top to bottom. In-circuit, functional, boundary scan, fixture design, coverage analysis, and what gets tested where. This is the most under-transferred item in any product move, because coverage assumptions live in a factory and not in a document. Assume you're rebuilding it rather than inheriting it. High-potential and dielectric withstand, ground bond and safety critical functional checks are process steps on a mains-connected outdoor product, and they're yours.
First article and process qualification. You define the package, you run it, and you have the authority to fail it. Capability studies, control plans, process failure mode and effects analysis, and the traveller an operator actually follows.
Workmanship class. You'll set our acceptance standard against IPC-A-610J and IPC J-STD-001J and choose between Class 2 and Class 3. That choice moves cost, yield and rework rate. You'll make it and hold it, against a contract manufacturer who'd prefer the looser one and a licensor whose line may run to a different one.
Yield, reported weekly. First-pass yield, defect Pareto, top-defect closure, rework rate, and the cost of the parts destroyed getting there. We own the parts, so every point of yield is our cash.
Factory-side readiness for the certification body's site addition. Our licensing partner holds and pays for safety certification. What they can't do from another continent is make our building pass a site inspection and get our location onto their certification file. You don't own the certification. You own the factory being ready when the auditor arrives.
The line, rented or owned. Whether we contract with an electronics manufacturing services provider or stand up our own surface mount line is genuinely open and you'll help decide it. If we contract, you're the technical authority over their new product introduction team. If we build, you build it.
You've personally taken a product designed and built in one country and put it onto a line in another, and you can tell me what broke. Not managed the programme. Did it, and remember the yield number in month one and the yield number in month six.
Not looking for a quality management systems or audit background; a certification body or test laboratory career; a design engineer with no factory time; or a vice president who manages managers.
Palo Alto to start. The assembly site isn't fixed yet between Texas and California. Expect substantial travel to the licensor's engineers in the first year, in blocks rather than day trips. On the line, not near it.
Write to Kevin@BrightSaverIndustries.com and tell me about a product you moved from one factory to another. What first-pass yield was in month one, and what it was in month six.
All four seats report to me. This is early, and the assembly site and the rent-or-own decision on the line are both genuinely open. If that reads as a problem rather than as the reason to come, it's the wrong time to join.
Bright Saver Industries