Adi Prasad brings Tesla and CloudKitchens lessons to Matter's AI factories

Adi Prasad, a 35-year-old MIT-trained manufacturing engineer who worked at Tesla, Apple, CloudKitchens, and Rivian, is applying lessons from Elon Musk and Travis Kalanick to Matter, an AI manufacturing startup running a 54,000-square-foot factory in Sunnyvale, California. In an as-told-to essay published by Business Insider on July 31st, Prasad described his career as a deliberate apprenticeship, citing Musk's first-principles reasoning and Kalanick's zero-based budgeting as influences on how he allocates resources at Matter. Prasad, who completed an MBA at Harvard Business School in 2025, co-founded Matter with Adi Ranjan, Charly Mwangi, and Aish Varadhan.

Adi Prasad @adiprasad27 https://x.com/adiprasad27?ref=runtimewire spent a decade studying how prominent operators built companies. He is now testing those lessons at Matter https://www.makematter.co/?ref=runtimewire , an AI manufacturing startup running a 54,000-square-foot factory in Sunnyvale, California. In an as-told-to essay published by Business Insider on July 31st https://www.businessinsider.com/learned-from-elon-musk-travis-kalanick-built-ai-tech-startup-2026-7?ref=runtimewire , Prasad described his career at Tesla, Apple, CloudKitchens and Rivian as a deliberate apprenticeship. The 35-year-old founder said he chose jobs where he could watch consequential technical and business decisions being made up close, then carried those operating habits into Matter. Prasad's path started with manufacturing rather than startup finance. He earned a master's degree in manufacturing from MIT in 2015 after studying mechanical engineering at Manipal Institute of Technology. His MIT thesis https://dspace.mit.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/a5f4a600-5450-4347-bc54-7d5d5a3cc288/content?ref=runtimewire examined the mechanical design of an optics bench for a UV-LED liquid chromatography detector, including vibration, thermal management, manufacturability and cost. He joined Tesla in 2015 and worked on scaling production of the Model X's Falcon Wing doors, one of the vehicle's most difficult assemblies. Tesla was still small enough, Prasad said, that he presented in meetings with Elon Musk @elonmusk https://x.com/elonmusk?ref=runtimewire and watched Musk reduce engineering problems to their underlying physical and economic constraints. "I didn't join these companies because I wanted to spend my entire career there," Prasad told Business Insider. "They were the first step in a much bigger plan of entrepreneurship." An apprenticeship across the factory and the balance sheet Prasad's account of Musk centers on first-principles reasoning. He said Musk challenged explanations built around convention and pressed teams to establish why a process or requirement existed. The lesson was practical: technical ambition had to serve an aggressive production and business plan. After Tesla, Prasad spent a year as a product quality manager at Apple. He then joined CloudKitchens among its first 100 employees, according to his account, to work around Travis Kalanick as the former Uber chief built a delivery-only commercial kitchen operation. Kalanick offered a different part of Prasad's operating education. Prasad said he watched Kalanick focus the organization through zero-based budgeting, requiring expenses and priorities to be justified from the ground up. That return-on-investment discipline now informs how Prasad allocates resources at Matter, where factory space, equipment, labor and software development all compete for capital. The combination fits the business Prasad chose to build. Autonomous manufacturing requires deep engineering, while contract manufacturing survives on utilization, yield, delivery performance and cost control. A founder can have a compelling automation thesis and still lose money through poorly sequenced equipment purchases or an underused factory. Prasad later worked at Rivian and completed an MBA at Harvard Business School in 2025. He moved to the Bay Area after graduation and committed full time to Matter. MIT's Spring 2026 mechanical engineering publication https://meche.mit.edu/sites/default/files/Spring 2026.pdf?ref=runtimewire identifies Prasad and Adi Ranjan as Matter cofounders. In a March profile of Matter https://poetsandquants.com/2026/03/14/2025-most-disruptive-mba-startups-matter-harvard-business-school/?ref=runtimewire , Prasad also identified Charly Mwangi and Aish Varadhan as cofounders. He described a group whose experience spans factory and manufacturing work at Tesla, Rivian, Apple and Intel, alongside Ranjan's earlier work building Cardinal Robotics. That breadth matters because Matter is attempting to sell production capacity while developing the software intended to make that capacity progressively more autonomous. It is an operating challenge spanning customer acquisition, factory design, procurement, quality systems, robotics and machine learning. Matter starts with the final stages of production Matter's current commercial wedge is narrower than Prasad's long-term vision. Matter describes itself as a US manufacturing partner handling final assembly, testing and packaging for robotics and complex electromechanical products. Matter supports customers from early design and pilot builds through scaled production, according to its website. Prasad has described MatterOS as the software layer connecting design, procurement, automation, quality and factory operations. In March, he said Matter had multiple letters of intent and active design-for-manufacturing programs in robotics, consumer hardware and energy. Those were company-supplied claims, and the customers were not named in that account. The sequence gives Matter a way to gather production data while operating a manufacturing service. Each assembly run can expose recurring engineering work, quality failures and process decisions that software might automate. Matter can then use those systems inside factories it controls, rather than trying to sell an untested software layer into plants operated by other manufacturers. Prasad summarizes the thesis as rebuilding American manufacturing "as a software problem, not a labor problem." The framing is designed to move Matter out of the low-margin contract manufacturing category and into the venture-backed market for physical AI. Matter still has to prove that the software changes the economics of running a factory. The Sunnyvale facility is the first physical test. Prasad told Business Insider that it is live and that Matter has over two dozen people working on the operation. The factory's useful measures will be concrete: how quickly it can onboard a product, how often equipment can be reused across customers, whether quality improves across production runs and how much human engineering work MatterOS can remove. Those questions explain why Prasad's lessons from Musk and Kalanick fit together. First-principles engineering can strip away inherited factory assumptions. Zero-based budgeting can stop an ambitious hardware startup from treating every machine, feature and expansion plan as essential. Prasad spent his 20s learning those disciplines inside companies operating at scale. Matter is where he has to show they can be turned into a repeatable manufacturing system of his own.