Dartmouth Features
Control Seat Co-Founder Warren Shepard
Dartmouth's Department of Computer Science published a Q&A with our co-founder Warren Shepard, sitting down with him to talk about Control Seat, Y Combinator, and why the timing is right to rebuild industrial software from the ground up.
We're proud of the piece, and proud of Warren. A few highlights worth sharing.
The problem we're solving
Warren put it plainly in the interview:
"The software that's used to do it right now is very old, and it uses a lot of proprietary pieces that make it harder to work with. There's a steep learning curve, and it's very manual. We're building a much more modern platform that automates a lot of these workflows and makes the systems significantly easier to use."
Both Warren and Jack encountered this firsthand during internships at SpaceX, Microsoft, Tesla, and Amazon. The same class of software running critical infrastructure at some of the world's most sophisticated organizations felt decades behind anything they were used to. That observation became the seed for Control Seat.
Why now
Industrial control software has always been hard to break into. These systems are sticky: once configured, replacing them means migrating years of data and retraining teams. The barrier to entry has historically kept the space locked to a handful of legacy incumbents.
That's changing. Warren again:
"There's a very high barrier to entry. Or there was. But now AI can write software really, really quickly, and you can just move a lot faster now. There's a bigger opportunity to innovate in this space."
We're starting with an intelligence layer on top of existing systems: trends, analytics, anomaly detection, forecasting, and AI over the data plants already collect. The legacy platforms connect to thousands of hardware devices and collect enormous amounts of data. They just don't do much with it. We're changing that.
Y Combinator
Control Seat was incorporated in January and accepted into Y Combinator's S26 batch shortly after. YC accepts roughly 2 percent of applicants and invests $500,000 in each startup. The three-month program connects founders with mentors, a network of peers, and alumni who have built some of the most important companies of the last two decades.
Warren on the decision to start a company now rather than later:
"Jack and I are at a time in our lives when we have fewer constraints and the freedom to choose what we want to do and have an idea. So the opportunity is there, the idea is there, the team is there, and it just made sense to do it now."
On the Dartmouth foundation
Warren was a TA for CS 10 (Problem Solving via Object-Oriented Programming) seven times during his time at Dartmouth. He credited that experience, and the theory-heavy CS curriculum, for shaping how he approaches hard problems.
"The courses I took at Dartmouth helped me develop the ability to think deeply about problems. They really explore every possible aspect of a problem and taught me how to identify and eliminate bottlenecks on the way to finding solutions. You have to think that way when you're solving problems in startups too."
You can read the full interview on the Dartmouth CS department website.
If you're working in industrial operations and want to see what we're building, get in touch or request a demo. We're just getting started.
— Jack & Warren