SEACOMP (Displaytech, HDP Power, MH MFG)

Help Innovators Deliver Awesome.

We design, engineer, and manufacture consumer, medical, and industrial electronic devices.

HQ in San Diego, CA. Manufacturing at our wholly-owned factories in Tijuana, Mexico and Dongguan, China.

Strategic Partnerships

Conduit Venture Labs

Conduit is a venture studio focused on enabling founders, inventors, and strategic innovators to focus on solving the problems that face our planet and its inhabitants working at the intersection of the physical and digital.

Fellow

The New Way Inc.

Helping families, that are experiencing homelessness, to find help, homes, & hope.

Executive Director

GTM United

Ambassador of a private community of go-to-market professionals united by a mission to put their development first. Giving feedback, asking questions, practicing self-care, and making real connections.

Content Advisor

Instawork

Our vision at Instawork is to create economic opportunity for local businesses and professionals, globally.

Instawork is the on-demand staffing app for hospitality & light industrial shifts. We quickly and reliably match businesses with nearby qualified workers. We’re excited to enable our Professionals, a new generation of the emerging, diverse workforce, to be a part of the growing gig economy.

Senior Account Executive

Gemini Legal

Gemini is a legal copy service that compels and obtains document evidence for California attorneys representing injured workers.

The will and hope of Gemini is to embrace and meet our clients’ true needs by providing a safe, stable and competitive work environment where employees, clients and vendors enrich their community and themselves personally and professionally. We meet our challenge through principled, personal leadership.

Business Development Manager

Quartzy, Inc

Laid off due to COVID-19
-------------------------
Quartzy is a free web-based platform for managing research labs. It is used worldwide by 360,000 scientists in the academic, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical labs. 

Quartzy saves labs time and money!

As a Business Development Associate at Quartzy, I am responsible for building the supplier relationships and product portfolio that enable Quartzy to be the only free online laboratory management platform offering an extensive lab supply ordering system. 
See our rapidly growing list of supplier partners HERE:
https://www.quartzy.com/suppliers

Business Development Associate

BlueGrace Logistics

Business Development Executive

Sales Director

Senior Sales Executive

Sales Executive

Account Manager

Wolf Creek Brewery

Develop and maintain strategic partnerships with key retailers and restaurants. Assume leadership role in implementing key brewery initiatives with distributors, retailers, and restaurants. Work closely with distributor on new product releases, seasonal releases and pre-orders for brewery. Drive and grow sales. Act as the face of Wolf Creek Brewery within a given territory.

Territory Manager

Wesco Aircraft

Provide pricing analysis for management. Perform margin and pricing analysis in order to support business initiatives. Validate sales quotations for accuracy and profitability; exercise and manipulate data via analysis techniques. Develop a system of communication, documentation and review of internal and external comparative pricing data. Identify opportunities to optimize sales and profitability through pricing strategies. Confer with sales and marketing teams to develop proposals. Prepare multi-year cost and pricing models. Engage suppliers and branches.

Corporate Sales Analyst

We Design & Build Your Hardware

We design & manufacture
Industrial, medical, & consumer electronics
Small enough to fit in an oven

HQ in San Diego, CA. Manufacturing at our wholly-owned factories in Tijuana, Mexico and Dongguan, China.

Connor Bush

Shoutout to industrial designers.
Y’all do cool stuff.

Industrial designers:
Making “why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?” moments happen every day.

Connor Bush 🔋🖥📟

We Manufacture Your Hardware at Scale (USA, Mexico, & China) | Ecosystem, Pipeline & Partner Strategy

Founders always ask for the same thing:
“Do you know a partner who can do everything: Engineering, prototyping, low-volume builds, and mass production?”

I get why.
On paper, it sounds perfect:

🔹 One team that knows the product from Day 0
🔹 Smooth handoff into EVT/DVT/PVT
🔹 Manufacturing input baked into early design
🔹 Less friction, fewer vendors, more trust

Totally intuitive.

But here’s the reality almost nobody says out loud:
Those are four completely different skill sets, with different cultures, tempos, tools, and incentives.

And the partner who is world-class at mass production is ALMOST never world-class at rapid iteration.
Because the traits that make you strong at one phase often make you weak at the other.

Mass production excellence =
🔸 Rigid systems
🔸 Heavy validation
🔸 Process obsessed
🔸 Optimized for scale, yield, and stability

Early-stage excellence =
🔸 Fast
🔸 Messy
🔸 Creative
🔸 Comfortable with ambiguity and change

Trying to get one team to do both is like expecting awesome sushi at the italian restaurant. 
(They might try… but should they? 🤢)

Can it work?
Yes, but only under very specific conditions:

✔️ Clear, locked industrial design
✔️ Serious funding
✔️ No long pauses or fundraising gaps
✔️ A straight path from prototype to EVT → DVT → PVT
✔️ A product destined for mass production from Day 1

SEACOMP has done it.
But it takes alignment, timing, and a founder who understands what they are signing up for.

For most teams, the healthier model is a relay:
Expert design ➡️  expert prototyping ➡️  expert CM for scale.

Different people, same mission.

Not shaming anyone. The instinct makes total sense.
The physics of hardware are just harder than the theory.

------
Want to chat on this some more? Come hang with us at #CES.

Link in the comments.

Collecting quotes for ID, ME, EE, FW, or product development is a wild ride.

$40k from overseas.
$200k from the Midwest.
$700k+ from Boston or San Francisco.
Sometimes even a $300k and a $900k quote from the same city for the same scope.

At a certain point… the limit does not exist.

But here’s what most founders miss: you’re not just paying for hours or skill.
Hardware development is art, judgment, taste, and manufacturing philosophy baked into one.

So the real question isn’t:
“Why is one quote 10× another?”

The real question is:
What are you actually buying?

• Alignment with the partner who will build or design your product
• DFM baked in from Day 1 (not after three redesign loops)
• Whether incentives are to finish or to bill more hours
• Experience in your specific product category
• How many mistakes you will not have to pay for later

Quotes can go to infinity.
(Or sometimes to $0, which is equally dangerous lol.)

The cost of choosing the wrong partner is very real.

** For the practitioners who live this every day: what’s the widest spread you’ve seen, and what do you think actually drives those gaps?

Building 1 of something is hard.
Building 1,000,000 of that same thing is just as hard, but in a completely different way.

One requires creativity.
The other requires discipline, systems, and control.

This is where a lot of innovators get surprised.
They lock the design and think the hard part is over.

But in hardware, the real climb begins when you go from “this works once” to “this works every time.”

A lead came in today.
Source: “LinkedIn, Connor Bush.” (blush / hair flip)

But here’s the part I keep thinking about…

This wasn’t an overnight win.
And honestly, the “LinkedIn, Connor Bush” part was probably the least influential piece of the whole chain.

This one lead took YEARS to show up.

It took:
⭐ A teammate building trust with a customer years ago
⭐ Our engineers and ops absolutely crushing that program
⭐ A happy customer willing to do a case study
⭐ Our marketing manager turning that story into something real
⭐ Me spending four years building a network and posting consistently
⭐ Someone in my network engaging with a post this week
⭐ LinkedIn surfacing it to a stranger who needed what we do
⭐ And that stranger clicking through, reading the case study, and reaching out

It only looks like “a lead from LinkedIn.”
In reality, it was a long chain of small things done well by a lot of people.

There’s that old line: “It takes 20 years to become an overnight success.”
In hardware and sales, sometimes it just takes 20 steps.

Everything you do matters.
And eventually… it all stacks and hits at once.
--------
Anyways 🤷‍♂️ , come hang with us at #CES (link in comments)

Top of funnel has been buzzing. Meetings, leads, energy everywhere.

But I caught myself doing the classic move — sprinting the first lap and forgetting there’s a whole race left to run.

Early momentum means nothing if you drop the baton on follow up and nurture.

So now I am slowing down just enough to time block, calendar, and stay consistent.

Not slowing the pace — just smoothing it out.

Slow is smooth.
Smooth is fast.
And apparently, calendars help too. 🙃

Cancelled my mini camping vacation scheduled for next week.

Not because of grind culture.
Because hardware has real deadlines.

Balance is not always a 50/50 split.

Push now.
Camping in January.
Still balanced.

Goals met <3.

If you want to ship hardware by Black Friday 2026…

Start yesterday.

Love,
Connor

Join us! 

One of many #CES events we are hosting / co hosting. 

Space is limited across the various events. We will do our very best to accommodate all of our friends! 

Check out the link in the comments for the different SEACOMP Las Vegas happenings.

Join us for an exclusive gathering for leaders shaping the future of connected hardware at CES 2026!

We’re bringing together executives, founders, and directors for an elevated networking experience at The Venetian Resort.

This is your opportunity to step out of the show-floor noise and into conversations that will move your business forward - exchange insights on scaling strategies, building resilient supply chains, and what's next in the world of connected hardware.

Connected Devices + Conversations: A Networking Happy Hour
Tuesday, January 6, 2026 | The Venetian Resort | CES 2026
Register here: https://lnkd.in/gEEu2a8q

A special thank you to our sponsors Acorn Product Development, Mesh Systems, and intent for supporting this executive gathering!

Space is limited and attendance is by approval - register to get on the list today!

Our team is heading to CES in January and we want to meet with you!

Let's meet in Las Vegas to chat about your product and how we can help support your goals. We'd love to connect on:

- scaling your production in 2026
- leveraging our Mexico facility for duty-free imports into the US
- improving your speed to market with accelerated NPI

Let SEACOMP be your manufacturing partner in 2026. See all the ways we can connect at CES and request a meeting here: https://lnkd.in/gH5E-bPD

Trying to enjoy the holidays
while also
trying to ship everything before the holidays
while also
trying to prep for CES
while also
trying to plan around CNY
while also
trying to be a human with a family.

It’s a vibe.

If you’re feeling the “festive chaos” today, I see you.
Happy Friday. 🤝

Thanksgiving (yeah, I know I’m late lol) and mass production have something in common:

99% isn’t good enough.

You can have:
- Every side dish perfect
- Table set
- Guests arriving
- Desserts ready to go

But if the turkey is two hours late?
Dinner is two hours late.

Hardware works the same way.

NPI is a chain of perfectly timed steps:
tooling ➡️ components ➡️ tests ➡️ assembly ➡️ packout

You can nail almost everything...
…but if one critical item slips, the entire schedule bends around it.

Great manufacturing isn’t about heroics.
It’s about orchestration.
Dependencies.
Timing.
Flow.

Thanksgiving looks effortless when everything hits the table at once (and when someone else is doing all of the prep lol).
So does mass production.

Neither is an accident.

Happy holidays! And if you're pushing a product toward 2026, now’s the time to start timing your “turkey.” 🦃⚙️

Lost my fantasy football matchup this week by 0.84 points.

And honestly… losing by less than 1 point feels worse than getting blown out by 40.

A blowout is clean. Clear. Obvious.
You shrug, you move on, you fix your roster.

But a tiny margin loss?
That sticks with you.
You replay every lineup choice.
“Should’ve swapped that flex…”
“Why didn’t I check injuries…”
It lingers because it was just close enough.

Hardware is the same.

A catastrophic failure forces you to stop.
Rebuild.
Fix the root cause.
Come back stronger.

But a small, non-catastrophic failure in the field?
A 1% return rate.
A flaky latch.
A charging bug that “only happens sometimes.”

That is the dangerous one.

Because it’s just tolerable enough to live with.
Just cheap enough to avoid solving.
Just annoying enough to hurt reputation and growth
but not painful enough to trigger full correction.

Small problems linger.
And lingering problems compound.

In fantasy football, it costs you a matchup.
In hardware, it can quietly cost you the whole season.

If you're leading teams building connected devices, this is the room you’ll want to be in at CES! 

Meet other CEOs, founders, VPs, and product executives for a thoughtful break from the show. This networking event is designed for high-level discussion, insight sharing, and strategic relationship building. 

Connected Devices + Conversations: A Networking Happy Hour
Tuesday, January 6 @ The Venetian Resort during CES 2026
Please Register Here: https://lnkd.in/g2tjuMsd

Expect meaningful conversations on achieving operational excellence, accelerating speed-to-market, and the evolving landscape of connected devices. Space is limited and attendance is by approval - register now!

Thank you to Mesh Systems, intent, and Acorn Product Development for helping champion this executive community gathering during CES!

Sales Expert + Industrial Engineer + MBA

Jorge here from Puerto Rico. I'm an industrial engineer who transitioned to sales. It's funny because my grandfather and dad worked in sales, and I studied industrial engineering to get away from sales, but sales didn't get away from me. 

A few years ago, I grew sales for a startup here in PR from 0 to 3M in ARR (the first Puerto Rican startup in Y-Combinator). Transitioned to working at two venture-backed startups, Reprise and Offsite. 

I just finished my MBA + doing some sales consultancy work for startups in Puerto Rico. 

Happy to talk about how companies' culture affects productivity, Sales, PLG Strategies, GTM Engineering, Team Retreats, SaaS, and LATAM's growing sector for VC.

Right now, I'm happy with my role ias founder of The GTM Engineering Company, which mixes my background in industrial engineering and my 8+ years of experience in tech and sales. 

Looking to connect with startups looking for help with their GTM processes, Clay or CRM work.

Jorge B. Macías 🇵🇷

When people ask why I spend time mentoring founders in Puerto Rico, invest time in events SanturceTech or judging at Parallel18 (the island’s main startup accelerator), I tell them it’s because I learn as much as I give.

I’ve led B2B sales teams across thousands of accounts, and I’ve seen systems break under volume. So when a startup’s CRM is full of duplicates or their outbound emails get no replies, the call often comes my way. Explaining the fix face-to-face forces me to check if I really believe in the system I’m teaching. If I can’t walk someone through it clearly, then maybe it isn’t as strong as I think.

Founders bring problems in their rawest form. Lists that never convert, data scattered across tools, pipelines that look full but fall apart under closer inspection. Their questions make me slow down and break things into simple logic. Speaking it out loud reveals blind spots I might miss if I kept it in my head. More often than not, helping someone else with a fix shows me a gap in my own setup too.

After enough of these sessions/conversations, you stop overcomplicating things. You start explaining in ways any founder can act on. Each conversation makes the language cleaner and the systems tougher under real pressure.
If a founder leaves a session and can’t put what we discussed into practice by next week, then I need to rethink that part of my approach.

PS: You can't see me in the picture but I am in there, who can spot me? 👀

Sales Expert + Industrial Engineer + MBA = GTM Engineer 🤓

What people don’t see: waking up early on a Saturday to write case studies for the first 10 clients I’ve worked with since launching The GTM Engineering Company. Small grind now, huge upside. LFG.

Most people talk about finding a mentor like there's supposed to be one voice that shows you the path. I've never had that, and I don't think it exists the way people imagine it.

I found it works better to build a bench, a small group of people who each cover a part of what I need:

When I need perspective on where the industry is heading, I lean on Brendan from The Signal (.club) newsletter. He pushes me to think about what's coming next instead of reacting to what's already in front of me. If I can't see ahead, I'm only ever playing catch-up, and his guidance keeps me from falling behind.

When I need help with execution, I go to Emmanuel, a mentor who runs his own consulting firm. He deals in the mechanics: how to manage a project when it's stuck, how to keep stakeholders steady when things are going sideways, and how to press harder when momentum finally shows up. He helps me turn ideas into results instead of letting them stall out.

Finally, when I need to sharpen my technical skills, I lean on the Clay Cafe community. People like Nico helped when I started my first vibe coding project. But overall it's a group of people deep in the weeds of GTM, sharing shortcuts and new ways to use the tools we all build with. Staying close to them allows me to truly stay ahead of the curve. 

If I tried to force these needs into a single relationship, I'd be blind in too many places. The reason I've kept moving is because I have a bench of people covering the blind spots I can't see myself.

The biggest deal I ever chased was with one of the largest enterprise clients the company could ever have, the kind that would have been the crown jewel of our company. I spent almost a year inside it, only to watch it collapse in my hands at the very end.

I sat/met with the CEO every couple of months, sent flowers on her birthday, pushed my way through legal, IT and finance reviews, fought through double approvals etc. It moved forward piece by piece and it took forever until one day my own CEO pulled me aside and said the product could never handle the volume of this enterprise. A year of work, all gone in a single conversation. 

Losing to a competitor never bothered me because at least then the product was in the fight. This was worse. I had already proven the value, the people on the other side believed in us, but we weren’t ready to serve them at the scale they needed. 

It felt like everything I had put in had been torched. I fought with my CEO until the conversations turned into shouting matches. It was bad. I even thought about walking away from the company because all I could see was wasted time and a buried golden deal.

The only part that held was the relationship. The CEO on the potential client side had every reason to cut me off, but instead she decided to believe in us twice. When she moved into a bigger role at another very similar enterprise, she called us back in. 

She already knew how far we would go to make it work, and when the timing was right she gave me another shot. 

Fun fact: That second deal turned out to be much larger than the first. 😅

⛳ Michael posted something recently that hit exactly what I've been seeing. In 2005 it was Salesforce, in 2015 it was HubSpot, in 2025 the life changing company is Clay. These kinds of companies are only born every 5-15 years, and they represent a paradigm shift in how marketers and salespeople do business. Huge consulting businesses have been built on top of these ecosystems, a lot of them nine figures.

I'm 100% with Michael on this as I’ve built my entire company around Clay.

When I started, I was dealing with the same problem every founder has. Data scattered across five different tools, manual enrichment eating up hours, and a CRM that turned into a mess the second you tried anything. I was looking for something that could pull cleaner data and actually keep it organized.

Clay became the foundation that let me build entire systems. I could pull signals from anywhere, layer them together, score accounts based on what actually matters, and hand clients workflows that would scale without needing constant fixes. That's when I realized this was the thing everything else needed to be built on top of.

I wasn't around for the first Salesforce Dreamforce or HubSpot's Inbound events, but from what I see in this community, it feels like the same kind of beginning. I went to Sculpt Clay on September 17 where I spent two days talking shop with builders who are pushing this platform further than anyone expected. 

The demand for people who know how to build with Clay is already outpacing supply. Founders are reaching out looking for help with systems they can't patch together with Zapier/n8n anymore.

When a platform becomes infrastructure, everything shifts. I saw it with Salesforce, watched it with HubSpot, and I'm watching it happen right now with Clay.

I'm betting the next 10 years of my business on it.

PS: Here is one of my favorite pictures from my time @ Sculpt

I ran an outbound campaign for a client that generated nearly 300 replies and booked calls with close to 50 companies, including multiple Fortune 500 enterprises with 5,000+ employees. Exactly the type of organizations I used to dream about meeting back when I was an Enterprise AE 

Everything was moving exactly how they wanted it to, and I genuinely thought we were building something that would scale even further from there.

Then the volume we created became too much for their existing sales team to handle. They had more qualified opportunities than they knew what to do with. Instead of continuing to invest in the go-to-market engineering work that built the pipeline, they decided to hire another AE to manage all the interest we'd generated.

Companies are absolutely right to make a call like that when they need immediate capacity to close deals. But it's also a signal to me that I'd built something efficient enough that they felt confident stepping back into a traditional sales model.

The system worked so well that it made itself feel optional, which is both validating and a little ridiculous at the same time.

As long as they're closing deals with the pipeline we built together, I'm happy. The work did exactly what it was supposed to do, even if that meant working myself out of the engagement faster than I expected.

PS: Happy thanksgiving to everyone tomorrow! 🦃

The difference between a six-month deal and a two-year slog comes down to whether you're chasing companies that need your solution today or trying to convince them they have a problem. I stopped wasting time on the latter.

I've spent the last year building a GTM system that cuts our sales cycle in half by focusing only on accounts that are already showing intent. The four phases of the motion include:

(1) Build the list
The accounts you target need to show signals that they're ready for your solution today. When you're chasing companies without clear buying intent, you end up stretching sales cycles from six months to over a year just trying to build a case for why they should care. That time adds up fast.
I use Clay to orchestrate the data and build lists of companies that match our ideal profile. The platform pulls in firmographics, technographics, and intent signals all in one place, which means I can filter for accounts that are already showing signs of need rather than hoping they'll develop interest later.

(2) Create visibility
Once I know who I'm targeting, I start posting content on LinkedIn that speaks directly to the problems those accounts are facing. This is where visibility begins to build before any outreach happens. The content has to address their specific pain points and the outcomes they're trying to reach. When someone from a target account sees a post that mirrors exactly what they're dealing with internally, they remember it. That recognition creates context for every conversation that follows.

(3) Watch for signals
This is where most GTM teams go blind, but tracking engagement is what separates guesswork from strategy. I need to know which accounts are actually paying attention and where they're showing up.
ZenABM lets me see if target companies are running LinkedIn ads, which tells me they're actively investing in growth and likely evaluating new tools. When I spot that signal, I know the timing is right to move forward. From there, I use BetterContact to pull verified emails and phone numbers for the people at those companies who are most likely to be involved in buying decisions. The enrichment is clean and the data is current, which means outreach doesn't bounce or go to outdated contacts.

(4) Start the conversation
Once I have engaged accounts and verified contact information, the outreach begins. I plug the contacts into lemlist or HeyReach.io to build sequences that feel personal and relevant. The messaging references the content they've been engaging with and ties directly back to the signals that put them on the list in the first place.

Every conversation is informed by what I already know about the account, which makes the pitch feel less like a cold reach and more like a continuation of something that already started.

The entire workflow is built to reduce wasted effort and focus resources on accounts that are already moving in the right direction.

I've been working in SaaS for close to 10 years. Started carrying quota as an SDR and AE, moved through mid-market and enterprise, lived through hiring waves that felt permanent and then disappeared in a quarter.

Every role showed me the same thing: most GTM problems look complicated until you know where to look.

When a founder calls me now, they've usually spent months trying to fix it themselves. The CRM is cluttered, stages are vague, discovery questions live in someone's head instead of the system. They hire reps who are talented but the pipeline stalls anyway because the handoff was never documented.

I open the system and I can see it immediately.

1/ The stages don't match how buyers actually move.

2/ There's no trigger to surface when an account starts to shift.

3/ The objection that signals intent, the question that opens budget, the email that revives a stalled deal - it's all still locked in the founder's memory instead of built into the playbook.

I fix it in days by tightening the stages, adding the right triggers, and documenting what actually moves deals. The pipeline that looked dead starts closing again.

That reaction always reminds me of an old story I heard when I was younger. A plumber shows up, taps one valve, and stops a leak in five minutes. The bill is $200. The homeowner protests, and the plumber replies, "It's $10 for the time and $190 for knowing where to tap."

The system looks simple once it's fixed, but knowing which stage to cut, which question to add, which handoff was missing - that comes from years of sitting in the seat, carrying the number, and watching what works when the market slows. 

You're not paying for the days it takes to fix it, you're paying for the 10 years it took to know exactly where to tap.

I was working on a HubSpot project with four or five variables in Clay. The process was straightforward: enrich one variable, standardize it, score it, and then move on to the next. When it's all done, I add up the scores to get a final priority classification.

It's a decent system, but I couldn't shake the feeling that there might be a better approach.

So I asked Blanca A. if she preferred scoring each variable like I'd been doing or if it would make sense to clean everything up first and then feed it into an AI prompt for a one-and-done scoring. After a moment, she suggested I try both methods and compare the results.

That suggestion opened up a whole new avenue I hadn't considered. I could stick with the familiar foundation I have, then layer AI over it to see if it highlights different priorities based on our business context.

Those raw scores often miss the big picture. A number tells you something, sure, but it doesn't capture what the company does or who we're trying to reach. If I feed the enriched data into an AI prompt along with context about our business and ideal customer profile, the AI might prioritize things in a way that captures nuances a simple formula can't pick up.

A year ago, this wouldn't have worked because prompts couldn't handle that volume of information without glitching. But now, with newer models like MCP-style prompts that allow for more context and structure, the technology has finally caught up to the idea.

The best projects come from seeing your current process as a hypothesis rather than a final answer.

taplio

The Battle

Connor Bush

Jorge B. Macías 🇵🇷

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taplio

The Battle

Connor Bush

Jorge B. Macías 🇵🇷

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Connor Bush's LinkedIn Performance

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