Laurynas Veckys Went From Tesla’s European Expansion to Rebuilding a Lost American Industry

The Solcoa Chief of Staff has built his career around scaling physical operations, from electric vehicles and logistics networks to one of the West’s most difficult industrial supply chain problems.

The furnace floor is a long way from the sales, delivery, and service operations Laurynas Veckys helped scale during Tesla’s Model Y expansion across Europe. Yet the progression makes sense to him. At Tesla, Veckys learned what happens when ambitious technology meets the physical demands of growth. Previously, as an early employee at Vinted Go, he helped build a logistics network from the ground up. Today, as Chief of Staff at Solcoa Industries, he is applying that operating experience to a problem with far fewer established systems to inherit: producing rare earth metal in the United States.

Laurynas has spent much of his career in businesses where execution cannot remain theoretical. His work has involved vehicles that must reach customers, logistics networks that must function across markets, and industrial processes that have to produce usable material consistently. That experience now places him inside a broader effort to rebuild physical manufacturing capacity in the West at a time when governments and companies are rediscovering how difficult it is to recreate industries once they have disappeared.

“I have always been drawn to the point where a strategy has to become something real,” Laurynas said. “A plan only matters if the operation can actually carry it out.”

At Tesla, he worked on scaling sales, delivery, and service operations across Europe and the Middle East during the Model Y ramp. The job exposed him to the operational side of a major industrial transition. Electric vehicles could be presented as a technology story, but reaching customers at scale required processes that held up as volume increased and conditions changed across markets.

“When you are scaling quickly, the problems become very concrete,” Laurynas said. “A process that works at one volume can fail at another. You learn to look for where the next constraint will appear before it becomes the thing that stops everything.”

He carried the same mindset into European startups. At Vinted Go, Laurynas joined early and helped build the logistics arm connected to one of Europe’s largest marketplaces. He later worked at Buycycle on commercial partnerships around the world. Those roles gave him experience building operating systems while the organizations around them were still evolving, requiring decisions to be made without the mature infrastructure available inside a long-established company.

By 2025, Laurynas wanted to work on a problem where the operational challenge was even more physical. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and joined Solcoa as Chief of Staff. The company has developed and operates a high-temperature pyrometallurgical process for converting rare earth oxide into NdPr metal, a material used in permanent magnets across industries including electric vehicles, robotics, technology infrastructure, and defense.

The move brought Laurynas closer to the production floor. Solcoa operates a 10 tonnes per year NdPr metal production line in Alameda, California, that runs around the clock. The company is scalling fast to increase the production capacity to 500 tonnes per year of NdPr metal.Laurynas’s responsibilities span commercial and operational execution, including oxide feedstock supply, metal production, qualification discussions with the largest automotive manufacturers, and engagement with major technology companies and magnet producers.

Rare earth manufacturing presents a different kind of operating challenge from scaling an established product or logistics system. Laurynas says the Western metallization industry offers little of the mature support structure found in more established manufacturing sectors. There is no large pool of experienced workers already trained for this particular process, and there is no equipment supplier offering a complete production line that can simply be installed and switched on.

“There is no turnkey playbook for this,” Laurynas said. “You are building the process while developing the team and creating operating knowledge at the same time. That changes the way you have to approach execution.”

For Laurynas, that experience has reinforced a lesson that has followed him through several stages of his career: planning is essential, but operating a system reveals things that modeling cannot.

“You learn from running the process,” he said. “There are problems you only see once production is actually happening, which is why I spend time on the floor which helps to solve challenges much quicker.”

He has also learned to avoid designing an operation around a single supplier, customer, or shipping route. Laurynas expects some part of any supply chain to fail eventually, whether because of a commercial problem, a transportation disruption, or a change outside the company’s control. Building alternatives into the system becomes part of keeping production moving.

That discipline is increasingly relevant as the United States and other Western countries try to rebuild industrial capabilities that were outsourced over several decades. Capital can finance a facility, and policy can create incentives to build one, but neither automatically produces the operating knowledge required to run it. Rare earth metallization makes that gap especially visible because so much of the expertise, equipment, infrastructure, and workforce capacity has to be developed alongside the production process itself.

Solcoa’s current expansion plans give Laurynas a larger version of the challenge he has pursued throughout his career. The company is working to increase its metallization capacity substantially, which requires securing feedstock, expanding production capabilities, training people, and converting commercial discussions into long-term relationships.

Laurynas sees those earlier roles as preparation for the work he is doing now. Tesla exposed him to rapid industrial growth across multiple markets. Vinted Go gave him experience building logistics infrastructure in an organization that was still taking shape. At Solcoa, he is applying those lessons in an industry where rebuilding capacity also means rebuilding knowledge that the West allowed to disappear.

“The common thread for me is figuring out what it takes to move from an early operation to something that can really scale,” Laurynas said. “I wanted to work on rare earth and metallization specifically because it sits at a point in the supply chain that the West largely abandoned, but still depends on.”

His ambitions extend beyond increasing production at one facility. Laurynas wants to be part of a generation of entrepreneurs restoring industrial capacity the West spent decades giving away, while proving that rebuilding does not require copying the older processes used elsewhere. For him, that means treating industrial revival as an execution problem as much as a policy or investment question.

The measure of progress remains tangible. A plan has to survive equipment delays, staffing challenges, supplier problems, and the realities of continuous production. Laurynas has learned to trust what happens on the production floor because that is where weaknesses appear before they make their way into a report.

“Process improvements come from running the process,” Laurynas said. “The real problems and later solutions show up exactly on the production floor.”