Rangeview CEO Cameron Schiller: America needs a thousand more factories — not tools for factories, actual factories

Summary

Cameron Schiller, CEO of Rangeview, makes a pointed distinction that cuts through the current American manufacturing conversation: the country has too many startups building software tools for factories and not enough people actually building factories. His framing is direct — America needs "a thousand Rangeviews," not another wave of manufacturing-tech SaaS.

Schiller grew up traveling between the US and China, and credits that experience with shaping his view of the stakes. He observed what he describes as the American dream being lived out in China's coastal factory towns, driven by internal migration and hard work, while the equivalent civic identity around making things had hollowed out domestically. His production facility in El Segundo, California occupies a former space shuttle engine plant, a detail he uses deliberately to anchor the cultural argument.

The Manufacturing Gap Is Bigger Than It Looks

Schiller's core provocation is scale. He argues that if the US needed to triple its manufacturing output today, it would take five years just to stand up the factories — and nearly all the capital equipment required to do so is no longer made in America. The country has lost not just the factory base, but the machine tool industry that supplies it. The implication for defense and supply chain resilience is significant.

• Manufacturing represents more of US GDP than all of tech combined, by Schiller's account
• Current domestic "assembly" is largely screwdriver operations bolting together imported components, which he dismisses as insufficient
• A tripling of output scenario would route most new capital spending overseas, since the equipment supply chain is gone

Casting, Not Additive, Is the Bet

Schiller is skeptical of the additive manufacturing hype cycle, describing metal 3D printing as broadly failing on qualification and unit economics at scale. His company is focused on casting — liquefying and molding metal — and specifically on giving casting what he calls "its CNC moment." The opportunity is to cast parts to 99% of final geometry and only finish the remaining detail with machining, rather than the current default of buying raw cast blocks and cutting away excess material.

He is explicit that there is no single dominant process: manufacturing requires roughly 100 people across the chain from ore extraction to final assembly, and each stage has its own economics and technology gaps.

Financing Structure Needs to Change

Schiller argues that venture capital is the wrong instrument for most factory assets. Physical manufacturing carries fundamentally different risk than software — if a factory burns, the superalloy inventory survives. He sees a bifurcated model emerging where venture capital funds the technology layer for venture-style returns, while the physical plant is financed through more conventional industrial debt structures. He points to several large factory companies already executing this kind of split-stack financing.

His background includes growing up near Skunk Works at what was then Bob Hope Airport in the San Fernando Valley, and his father came to California to work on the B-1 Bone supersonic bomber. That lineage informs the company's positioning around defense-relevant, hard-material manufacturing.