Rob Ratterman and the value of an uneventful day

A factory can have a very good day without producing a single interesting anecdote. The conveyors move. The motors turn. The people who arrived for work finish what they came to do. Nobody needs to become the hero of an emergency. For Rob Ratterman, co-founder and chief executive of Waites, that unremarkable sequence is a business worth building.

There is a pleasing complication in his ambition. Waites puts wireless sensors on industrial equipment and uses machine learning to help detect trouble. Yet Ratterman's public argument keeps returning to people: the customer with a stubborn problem, the analyst interpreting a signal, the technician deciding what to do next. His vision of technological progress leaves plenty of room for a pair of work boots.

Long before he was discussing factory maintenance, he helped build an online auction company that eBay bought. The distance between an auction listing and a vibrating motor is considerable. Looking across his career, though, a common question emerges: what can software make easier for the person on the other end? The industries change. The obligation survives.

The office above the pool hall

Ratterman's entrepreneurial story starts in Cincinnati, where he graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1995. He and Chris Downie began their venture in 1996; Up4Sale went online the following year. Tom Duvall and Walter Carroll joined them. Four university graduates were taking a chance on a medium that was still teaching businesses what it could be.

The early surroundings were agreeably unceremonious. Their office sat above a pool hall in Over-the-Rhine. After eBay acquired Up4Sale in 1998, the founders insisted on staying in Cincinnati. They also kept that office. A California buyer could acquire the business without acquiring the right to choose its scenery.

That detail gives the familiar startup exit a more individual shape. Ratterman and his colleagues had built something a much larger company wanted. They could still negotiate the terms of their working lives. Success did not oblige them to exchange a familiar neighborhood for somebody else's idea of the proper address.

Ratterman had worked at American Financial before the venture. He and Downie knew each other through Delta Sigma Pi at the university. Ratterman also learned computer programming in his spare time. The combination is useful to remember: business training, corporate employment, and a technical skill acquired outside the timetable. An entrepreneurial career can begin with a syllabus and then wander productively away from it.

An auction needs more than bidders

At eBay, Ratterman's work included international expansion. He later founded CanDo.com, a consultancy focused on complex transactional data. Both chapters put him close to the less photogenic parts of digital business: systems, transactions, and the work of making a growing service function across boundaries.

His name also appears among the inventors on an eBay-assigned patent granted in May 2013 for a system dealing with complaints about network-based transactions. It belongs to a family of problems that online commerce cannot avoid. Bringing strangers together is only the beginning. Someone must account for what happens when their transaction goes wrong.

The patent is a small but revealing counterweight to the auction-sale story. An acquisition is a milestone; complaint handling is continuing work. One makes an attractive retrospective. The other helps determine whether people can trust a service next Tuesday.

It would be too tidy to claim that every later decision flowed from those auction years. Still, the record shows Ratterman repeatedly working where information meets a practical obligation. Data has to support a transaction, a response, or a decision. Its existence alone does not settle the matter.

Two friends, one industrial question

Ratterman and Andrew Waites first met in 2001. Andrew brought experience in industrial sales; Rob brought experience building software businesses. Their eventual company grew from a straightforward observation: plant workers were checking equipment by hand, while wireless mesh networks suggested a way to monitor it remotely.

The question had a physical setting. Machinery needed attention whether or not somebody happened to be standing beside it. A useful system would have to gather signals from that machinery and make them intelligible elsewhere. Waites, founded in 2006, developed around that task.

Today its combination of sensing, software, and expert analysis reaches industrial operations across six continents. The company reports more than 500,000 sensors deployed. Such numbers describe the scale of the operation, but the unit of usefulness remains much smaller: a particular piece of equipment and a particular maintenance decision.

A company can make a persuasive chart about global reach. A customer still needs help with the machine in front of them. Ratterman's task as chief executive lives between those two views. Expansion increases the number of places the service must work; it also increases the number of circumstances its people must understand.

The customer brings the difficult bit

Ratterman is unusually direct about what he wants from a business relationship. In his writing on customer service, he describes satisfaction in receiving a problem his company can solve. He argues for careful listening, honesty about the time a solution will take, and the willingness to admit that an answer has not yet been built.

The stance makes demands on hiring, too. He favors people eager to tackle difficult customer problems. It is an operational preference with consequences: the customer conversation must influence the work, rather than merely produce a polite exchange followed by business as usual.

He has also advised entrepreneurs to delay outside funding where possible, preserving room to concentrate on customers. That is his stated preference, rather than a universal rule or a claim about every financing decision at Waites. It fits his broader emphasis on keeping the purpose of the business close to the problem being solved.

When Maura Abad interviewed him for Asset Management Visionaries in 2025, customer culture and personal responsibility were among the subjects. The episode's title, The First Secret to Success is Yourself, puts the responsibility squarely with the person running the business. A founder can buy software. The attitude toward the customer still requires a daily decision.

“Hold off on outside funding as long as possible.”Rob Ratterman, on entrepreneurial priorities

Keep a person at the end of the signal

Ratterman's position on industrial AI starts with the workforce. He recommends human collaboration and employee participation as companies introduce new tools. He also stresses the quality and completeness of the information those tools analyze. A confident answer built on an incomplete picture is an expensive form of confidence.

In maintenance, he distinguishes anticipating a problem from recommending an intervention. His interest in prescriptive maintenance concerns what teams should do, when they should do it, and what outcome to expect. The distinction brings the discussion closer to a working day. A prediction can open a question; a usable recommendation can help someone resolve it.

His June 2026 argument takes that reasoning further. Machine and process data should help organize the human work around a repair: the appropriate technician, the needed part, and a sensible opportunity to stop production. These are ordinary considerations, and that is their strength. They give the technology somewhere to land.

There is a quiet challenge here for anybody selling a vision of an automated factory. A dashboard can contain an extraordinary amount of intelligence while leaving its user with the same unresolved task. Ratterman's test asks whether the next action has become easier to carry out. The wrench remains stubbornly outside the screen.

The people behind the global footprint

For Ratterman, international operations also mean long-standing relationships. In November 2022, he spoke about the Ukrainian team behind Waites' hardware, software, machine learning, and vibration expertise. The team also ran European operations. By February of that year, the Ukrainian office had 60 people.

After Russia's invasion, he publicly described employees continuing their work under extraordinary conditions and expressed a commitment to the company's future there. His message to customers acknowledged delays in some software work and European installations. His message to colleagues expressed support. The practical disclosure mattered alongside the declaration of solidarity.

A global company is easy to depict as a map with dots. This chapter makes the dots harder to treat as abstractions. They represent people with accumulated knowledge, shared projects, and responsibilities that do not evaporate when conditions change.

Waites' expansion has continued through partnerships as well as its own team. In March 2025, it selected Lima-based Uteco Tecnología as its exclusive distributor in Peru. The arrangement extended its South American presence through a company with local industrial experience. Growth, in that instance, meant finding another organization capable of carrying the work into a particular market.

“Our Ukrainian team has been a vital part of each segment of our business”Rob Ratterman, November 2022

Cincinnati, with more room to work

The local story has continued, too. In April 2025, Cincinnati's city administration described Waites' plan to consolidate and expand at a Queensgate location. The project involved $1.1 million in improvements and an agreement to create 48 new jobs. Those were commitments attached to the expansion, rather than a retrospective count of positions already filled.

There is continuity with the young founders who kept their office after the eBay sale. Decades later, Ratterman's business was again making decisions about where people would work in the same metropolitan area. The products had changed substantially. Cincinnati remained part of the story.

Looking toward 2026, Ratterman urged manufacturers to choose manageable, practical AI projects. He described predictive maintenance as a possible entry point to broader understanding of operations, including how trouble in one machine might originate elsewhere in a process. That remains an ambition to develop, rather than a promise that every installation already delivers it.

An uneventful day gives this ambition a useful measure. People can plan work, carry it out, and leave without being summoned back by a breakdown. Ratterman has built companies around auctions, transactions, and machinery. At Waites, the desired ending is almost comically modest for a technology story: the equipment keeps working, and everyone gets on with their day.