Alex Mountjoy

Alex Mountjoy is an entrepreneur, inventor and builder whose career has moved from experimental physics and software engineering to consumer products, beverage manufacturing and industrial automation.

He has always lived somewhere between the computer and the machine.

Mountjoy grew up on a 40-acre farm outside Rochester, New York, where fixing things was less a hobby than a necessity. His mother became an auto mechanic; his father was a mathematician and physicist; and his stepfather was a physicist. As a boy, Mountjoy learned that when something doesn't work, the first question isn't who to blame.

It's how it works.

He studied physics at Tufts University, graduating magna cum laude in 1987. While there, he worked in the university's high-energy physics laboratory, building electronics and experimental equipment. He subsequently interned at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he worked on high-energy physics experiments.

His first professional position took him to École Polytechnique in France, where he worked on laboratory software and helped port programs from minicomputers to networked PCs. He subsequently spent several years as a programmer and systems analyst in New York before moving to California in 1991.

In 1995, Mountjoy and his wife founded Dolce Mia, initially a manufacturer of handmade home décor. As the economics of the gift industry changed, the company evolved into a California-made bath and body business.

In 2016, looking for a new opportunity, Mountjoy entered the emerging cannabis beverage market and founded Mountjoy Enterprises. The company developed Mountjoy Sparkling, an early cannabis-infused sparkling beverage, and later expanded into hemp-derived CBD beverages that were distributed nationally.

The beverage business eventually contracted as the regulatory and economic environment changed. Mountjoy Enterprises ultimately evolved into a small beverage manufacturing and co-packing operation.

Then came an unexpected return to machines.

As the technology job market weakened, Mountjoy returned to hands-on mechanical work, becoming an electric-motor mechanic. The job reconnected him with something that had been present throughout his life but had become increasingly distant from his professional work: the physical world.

Motors. Pumps. Controls. Electrical systems. Mechanical systems.

And an idea emerged.

Most small businesses cannot afford the kind of automation normally offered by industrial automation companies. Yet many of them have repetitive jobs that are obvious candidates for automation.

Mountjoy realized that his particular combination of skills—physics, electronics, software, mechanical systems, manufacturing and business—could be used to approach the problem differently.

Instead of starting with an expensive automation platform and asking a business to adapt to it, start with the job.

Go onto the factory floor.

Do the work.

Understand the problem.

Build the simplest machine that solves it.

That idea became BuildShift.

Today, Mountjoy is developing BuildShift as a design/build automation company focused on practical, affordable automation for businesses that have been priced out of conventional industrial solutions.

At the same time, he continues to operate Mountjoy Enterprises and Dolce Mia, using both businesses as real-world manufacturing and product-development laboratories.

His career has never followed a straight line.

That may be its most useful feature.

Each chapter added another layer: physics taught him how to understand systems; software taught him how to control them; entrepreneurship taught him how to make and sell things; manufacturing taught him how things actually get made; and mechanical work brought him back to the physical world.

Today, all of those disciplines meet in one place.