Paul Vizzio
DIRECTOR OF HARDWARE ENGINEERING, PROTEUS MOTION INC.
COBBLING TOGETHER SCRAP PARTS from toy rockets and bicycles was a favorite childhood pastime for Paul Vizzio—and to this day, he still busies himself with building and tinkering. “I’m not that old—but even for me, things have changed a lot since I was a kid and looking into engineering,” Vizzio said. The barrier to entry is a lot lower now: CAD is intuitive and 3D printing is simple and rewarding, he said. With all the different tools available, it’s easier to try something out and “see if you enjoy it.”
His professional career kicked off with a job at the Department of Defense for nuclear submarines, but he later changed his industry from government to small startups. It was a huge shift—not only in culture and budgets, but also as an engineer—going from low volume, complex machine parts to high volume injection molded consumer products. Fortunately, he had built up a good network and could lean on peers in the community for help transitioning.
Vizzio currently leads hardware engineering at Proteus Motion, a New York City startup. His proudest launch to date is the Proteus V2 system: a fitness machine that can deliver in five minutes what would normally take three hours in a lab with 20 pieces of equipment—“a sports science lab in a box.”
"I don’t know if creating businesses is a hobby, but that seems to take up most of my time.”
Paul Vizzio
He was responsible for the entire physical development of the product—the electromechanical design, physical prototyping, supply chain setup, and finding a manufacturer.
“We went from initial concept to first units off the assembly line in less than 12 months,” he said. The system is now at around 400 locations across the U.S. and Canada, serving professional and college teams, commercial fitness centers, sports facilities, and physical therapy and chiropractic clinics.
“I’ve worked at a lot of startups where we developed something cool, and then it kind of just fizzled out. But this is actually catching on,” Vizzio said. “We went from working in a small windowless room with five people to having almost 50 people now.”
Aside from his work at Proteus, Vizzio keeps himself busy with startup consulting, running a dog business on the side, and helping out with organizing meetup events around NYC.
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