#171 Tom Trill: Digital RF and Building a Culture People Choose at Qualinx

Tom Trill is the CEO of Qualinx, a Dutch deep-tech semiconductor company bringing radio frequency into the digital domain. In this PreVetted Podcast episode, Tom and Federico Ramallo get into what it takes to build a venture-stage hard-tech company: the culture that makes people relocate across the world to join a startup in Delft, how AI is changing engineering craft and human judgment, and the deceptively hard question of what "good enough" really means.Tom brings more than 25 years of semiconductor experience, with senior roles across Samsung, Cypress, and Freescale, a stint as co-founder of an AI vision startup, and now the CEO seat at Qualinx. He explains the company's core invention, digital RF, which brings RF back in line with Moore's Law: a reconfigurable receiver chip covering roughly 20 MHz to 8 GHz at an order-of-magnitude lower power, aimed at GNSS, positioning, and the connected edge. The mission is ubiquitous connectivity, so small and cheap it fades into the background like running water.They also dig into the human side of deep tech: building a company of 70+ people across two dozen nationalities, why values need constant reinforcement through rapid growth, why long-tenured subject-matter experts still beat AI on the hardest problems, and how AI agents can reduce the noise for engineers without removing human accountability.About Tom Trill- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomtrill/- 🌐 https://www.qualinx.ioAbout Federico RamalloFounder of Density Labs, the AI Engineering Partner for the mid-market, helping US companies ship AI to production, backed by a decade of shipping software with distributed engineering teams. Author of The Invisible Distance, the operating system for engineering leaders running teams across borders. Host of The PreVetted Podcast: 150+ conversations with VPs of Engineering, CTOs, and operators on what actually works.- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io- ✅ https://prevetted.ai🎙 PreVetted Podcast- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcastTIMESTAMPS:0:00 Introduction to Tom Trill and Qualinx1:38 Building a culture people choose to join10:04 AI, engineering craft, and human judgment19:22 Defining what is good enough27:02 Digital RF and ubiquitous connectivity34:10 Closing reflections on culture and craft#DeepTech #Semiconductors #DigitalRF