The Reboot Chronicles with Dean DeBiase

Brunswick Corporation has been rebooting itself since 1845. The company that started in woodworking went on to build pool tables, bowling equipment, fitness machines, coolers, and bicycles before making one of the most disciplined strategic pivots in modern manufacturing history: selling off everything that was not marine and doubling down on building the world's most complete marine ecosystem. Today, Brunswick is a roughly 6 billion dollar global powerhouse with more than 60 industry-leading brands across 26 countries and approximately 14,000 employees. Its outboard engine business has grown from low thirties market share to nearly 50 percent in the United States. Its parts and accessories business now represents 60 percent of earnings and revenue, a recurring annuity model that insulates the company from the volatility of new boat sales cycles. And its Freedom Boat Club, acquired for 60 million dollars in 2019, is worth conservatively half a billion dollars today. At the center of this transformation is Ryan Gwillim, who holds one of the rarest roles in corporate America: Chief Financial Officer and Chief Strategy Officer simultaneously.
On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Ryan Gwillim, CFO and CSO of Brunswick, to unpack how the world's oldest and largest marine company transformed itself from a conglomerate into a focused ecosystem platform, what the ACES strategy means for the future of boating, how Freedom Boat Club is redefining who gets to be on the water, why Brunswick is bringing manufacturing in-house as tariff pressure mounts, and what it took personally for a lawyer turned investor relations executive to end up steering the financial and strategic future of a 180 year old company.

Most companies deploying AI are making the same mistake. They are using it to do what they already do, faster and cheaper, and then wondering why the return on investment does not materialize. Dave Wright calls this the iteration trap, and breaking out of it is the central argument of his new book, Infinite, co-written with ServiceNow futurist Brian Solas. As chief innovation officer at ServiceNow, Wright has watched the company grow from 300 employees to 30,000, worked alongside every CEO the company has ever had, and spent decades building the actual systems that run inside thousands of the world's largest corporations. His perspective on AI is not theoretical. It is grounded in what happens when organizations stop asking how to automate what they already do and start asking what they want to become. The difference between those two questions, Wright argues, is the difference between AI as an incremental efficiency tool and AI as a genuine operating model for business reinvention.
On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Dave Wright, chief innovation officer at ServiceNow, to unpack why most AI strategies are failing before they start, how IKEA turned a customer service automation project into a billion euro revenue stream, what a hybrid workforce of humans and agents actually looks like in practice, why every company needs a chief workflow officer, and what it means to lead innovation inside one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies in the world. Wright also shares what he has learned from working under four very different CEOs and why the chief innovation officer might be both the best and worst job in any company.

Inside every AI data center, behind every GPU cluster, underneath every rack of compute and storage, there is a connection problem. For decades that problem was solved with copper. Copper cables connected computer storage to switching, and the system worked well enough. Then AI arrived and the speeds required to move data across those connections exceeded what copper physics can handle. The answer is fiber optics and the lasers that power them. That is the business of Lumentum, and it is why Nvidia wrote a two billion dollar check to make sure the supply was locked up. Under CEO Michael Hurlston, Lumentum has rebooted itself from a telecom-era optical components company into one of the most strategically critical infrastructure players in the AI economy. Revenue is on track to more than double from 1.5 billion dollars last year to over 3 billion this year. The stock has surged more than 1,500 percent. And the company is investing three years ahead of demand, building a new indium phosphide fabrication facility in Greensboro, North Carolina, to supply the laser chips that data centers will need as the conversion from copper to fiber optics accelerates.
On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Michael Hurlston, CEO of Lumentum, to unpack why lasers and fiber optics are the invisible infrastructure layer the AI economy cannot function without, how the company is managing the challenge of scaling from thousands of units per quarter to potentially hundreds of millions, why Lumentum is making a pure play bet on the data center opportunity while de-emphasizing other markets, and what it takes to lead a public company through rocket ship growth. Hurlston also shares the personal reboot story behind his career, including the catastrophic startup failure that ultimately sent him to Broadcom and set the foundation for everything that followed.

Every medical device implanted in a patient, every cell phone produced at launch scale, every vaccine vial filled at twelve hundred units per minute exists because of industrial automation. It is the invisible infrastructure behind modern manufacturing, and it is one of the fastest growing sectors in the global economy. Darragh de Stonndún has spent his entire career at the center of it. After leaving Ireland in 1998 in pursuit of the automation innovation happening in America, he spent decades building and leading automation businesses across the US, Germany, Ireland, and the UK. In August 2024, he co-founded AIR, an automated industrial robotics platform that has already acquired six best-in-class automation companies across three countries, grown to more than 500 employees, and is producing hundreds of millions in revenue. The timing could not be better. Reshoring, semiconductor expansion, and the race to automate manufacturing across life sciences, logistics, and consumer electronics are pushing the sector toward a hundred billion dollar market. AIR is building the platform designed to serve that market, and de Stondún is building it the same way he has always built machines: with precision, discipline, and an obsessive focus on getting every part of the system right.
On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Darragh de Stonndún, CEO of AIR, to unpack how he is building a unified automation powerhouse rather than a collection of acquired companies, why automation is no longer optional for manufacturers competing in a reshored America, how AI is reshaping what is possible in industrial robotics, what humans in the loop actually means on a factory floor, and why the biggest challenge in building AIR is not technology but separating signal from noise in a market moving faster than ever.

Every drone, autonomous vehicle, AI agent, and smart device running in the world today depends on silicon. And the software that enables that silicon to be designed, verified, and manufactured at scale is the domain of Synopsys. With nearly 28,000 employees and a clear path toward becoming a 10 billion dollar company, Synopsys has spent nearly four decades building the electronic design automation tools that chip companies cannot operate without. Now, with the acquisition of Ansys completed one year ago, Synopsys has expanded its platform from chip design into full system simulation, covering thermal, mechanical, fluid, and electrical considerations simultaneously. The result is a company that sits at the intersection of every major technology wave reshaping the global economy, from AI and data centers to autonomous vehicles, robotics, and quantum computing. Raja Tabet, senior vice president of strategic missions and technology at Synopsys, leads the forward-leaning portfolios at that intersection and has spent decades navigating the edge of what is possible in semiconductor design and systems engineering.
On this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Podcast, we sit down with Raja Tabet, SVP at Synopsys, to unpack why silicon is the most fundamental enabler of the pervasive intelligence era, how the Ansys acquisition transformed Synopsys into a full stack partner for system builders across every major industry, what digital twin technology means for the future of data centers and product development, how Synopsys is navigating deep partnerships with Microsoft and Nvidia while remaining neutral across the broader ecosystem, and what the next generation of engineers needs to understand to stay relevant in a world where AI is handling more and more of the coding