Kastle Jones, CEO and co-founder of Mechro, on closing the skilled-labor gap in field service and why he finally took the swing.
Kastle Jones, CEO and co-founder of Mechro, joins to talk about building AI for equipment manufacturers and their service networks — and why he believes the age of digging through paper manuals and support articles is coming to an end. Kastle shares his path from Muskogee, Oklahoma to Andover, Johns Hopkins, and the London School of Economics, through building Tulsa's entrepreneurial ecosystem, to finally taking the leap and founding Mechro. We dig into the real problem Mechro solves (a massive skilled-labor gap in field service), how AI can democratize specialized technical knowledge, what it took to build trust with a design customer from within an OEM's walls, and the philosophy behind building a team of people who are genuinely obsessed with the mission.
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Chapters
0:00 Intro: what's got Kastle so fired up
0:46 The long-held plan to eventually build something
2:14 "If you enjoy solving the problems, you can't really lose"
3:24 Overplanning vs. just jumping in sooner
2:13 Quick overview: what is Mechro?
2:32 The core problem — not enough skilled labor to fix machines in the field
2:54 How AI can democratize specialized expert knowledge
3:33 The adoption challenge across distributor and dealer networks
4:23 Why this shift is inevitable (paper manuals → AI)
5:01 The hardest part: educating a physical-industry customer base
6:49 Kastle's background: Muskogee, Andover, and finding ambition early
7:42 The full journey: Johns Hopkins, London, Endeavor, Tulsa
15:02 Deep in the weeds: why applied AI requires being on the ground
15:24 The "forward deployed engineer" story — building Mechro inside an OEM
16:11 Deciding it was finally time to take the swing
18:05 Meeting Gitwit and finding founder-market fit
20:10 What makes this problem space defensible (the "moat")
23:14 The first year: building trust with the design customer
25:16 Building the founding team
27:15 The one non-negotiable when hiring: real passion
29:57 What makes the Mechro team so strong
32:11 The vision: where troubleshooting and service are headed
34:50 Proactive AI agents replacing reactive support
37:19 Who the ideal Mechro customer is
38:58 Why dealer/distributor networks make this harder — and more valuable
40:54 Unblocking growth through better service
43:05 Advice for founders thinking about taking the leap
45:45 The Gitwit assignment process and building a hiring philosophy
47:39 Wrap-up and what's next for Mechro
