00:56:53 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[00:56:53] S1: Interesting. Well, LiveWire was working on a solution, but it's been a little bit rough. So, [00:57:00] S0: And, yeah, so so again, like, hey, g g b u says the average motorcycle rider can name several times they likely would have died if they were on a silent bike. So again, like, there's no buyer for this. Like, there's [00:57:14] S1: Because they're willing to risk it all? Is that the idea? [00:57:16] S0: Or No, no, no. It's like they... Like, because they're constantly sending out a ping to other people Hey. Because the bike is Oh, so [00:57:24] S1: okay. I I had no idea about this. This is interesting. Okay. Yeah. So they won't they won't want the silent bike. [00:57:28] S0: Yeah. You've been sitting in traffic and you hear like Yeah. Yeah. And then you and then you realize like, I shouldn't merge. Right? Yeah. Yeah. [00:57:35] S1: What about your speakers? Add speakers to it that are super loud. [00:57:39] S0: Yeah. Yeah. The bullhorn and then it's just the the But you can have your favorite sound effects. Like, imagine.
00:57:45 · John Coogan
[00:57:45] S1: This one? Yeah. Just just every time I fire on my bike. I'm going. I'm a make it go. Like that? It only shipped 358, electric motorcycles. They had predicted that in 2026, they would sell more than a 100,000. Wow. That is rough. Just a bit off. Very, very off. They started this project in 2014. But on, Monday, LiveWire, which is the subsidiary of the brand of Harley Davidson working on these electric motorcycles, announced that a special restructuring committee is weighing the company's options following resignation of the chief executive officer last week. Ruff, the CEO quit. Intended... The company said the moves are intended to facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of our strategic alternatives. LiveWire shares closed up 2%, though they are down 62 since the start of the year. I think this is just a realization of the economics. And yes, didn't the F-one 150 Lightning fail as well? That's And another example. I mean, that's less related to safety, but just when you think about the F-one 150 buyer, they want a big gas engine. They want an internal combustion engine. Electric trucks, it always felt like it was gonna be a hard sell even though there were some amazing amenities like the the front trunk that you could tailgate out of, the 240 volts, you know, you know, appliance level power so you can power tools. Like, it seemed useful, but it just wasn't in the in the zeitgeist the way that, oh, if you've been driving a Prius and then it's fully electric, it's kinda just like an appliance car that you're using to drive around. You don't you don't have a strong identity tied to the motor.
00:59:31 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Miles Arnone
[00:59:31] S0: The Yeah. [00:59:32] S1: Harley Davidson buyer clearly does. So very, very, very interesting. Anyway, we we we got some breaking news. What we got? [00:59:41] S0: Our first guest. [00:59:41] S1: Okay. Miles from Rebuild, the cofounder and CEO. Let me tell you about Console first. Console builds a agent. I mean, 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees resolution for access requests and password resets. And let's bring in Miles, cofounder and CEO of Rebuild. Miles, how are you doing? There he Welcome to the show. [00:59:59] S7: I'm well. [01:00:00] S1: Thank you so much for taking the time. [01:00:03] S0: It's an honor and a privilege to have you here today. [01:00:05] S1: This might be a gongbreaker. This is one of the biggest fundraisers we've had in a while. We're very excited to be joined by you. But why don't you kick it off with an introduction on yourself and the company? [01:00:14] S7: Sure. I'm Miles Arnaud. I'm the CEO of Rebuild. We didn't pick the great name Maple Bear. I'm feeling bad about that [01:00:20] S0: now. Yeah. [01:00:22] S1: Maple Bear is good. [01:00:23] S0: Yeah. It's not too it's not too late to change the name of your entity to some obscure sort of lore related to the company. [01:00:30] S1: We could re... Rebuild DBA maple bear. You could use
01:00:30 · John Coogan, Miles Arnone, Jordi Hays
[01:00:30] S1: We could re... Rebuild DBA maple bear. You could use [01:00:34] S7: butter goat or something like this. We could pick some food animal combination. Yeah. Anyway, Rebuild was was founded in 2020 to try and help reverse the extensive deindustrialization that's gone on in this country for the last forty years. You had a a guest on from Warp Sciences a couple of days ago. We talked a lot about this. This whole offshoring that took place over many decades has really destroyed our industrial base. It's negatively affected our national security posture, and it's removed a lot of great jobs. So we built a business over that time. We're about 2,000 people now across 15 facilities that can engineer and build complex products with startups typically or more established companies that have a new kind of hard tech and bring them to market and build them here. [01:01:19] S1: That's amazing. Amazing. Can you [01:01:21] S0: guys What were you doing prior to 2020? [01:01:24] S7: I did industrial turnarounds in private equity for about fifteen or twenty years. [01:01:27] S1: Thank So you for your service. I was hoping. [01:01:34] S0: We're we're we're sort of an inside joke. We're the the Strongest supporters? Strongest supporters the private equity industry. But was part of that some amount of guilt? Like, did you contribute to the offshoring? Then you were like, hey, this is bad, and I gotta [01:01:47] S7: kinda It's a great question, Jordan. Usually, I was brought in after the offshoring had happened, [01:01:53] S1: and they
01:01:53 · John Coogan, Miles Arnone, Jordi Hays
[01:01:53] S1: and they [01:01:54] S7: were trying to figure out how to save these companies. Right? So what happens when you offshore production is you make some extra money for a while, but then you very quickly lose the ability to design the product effectively. And also very often your subcontract manufacturer, particularly if they're in China, will often use that intellectual property to develop products that compete with you. So after one or two cycles, as you know, in private equity, the companies often move from one shop to another to another. After a few cycles of that, usually you're facing a pretty difficult situation. [01:02:26] S0: Very cool. And so what's been the what's been the strategy? It sounds like you've been buying, not just building yourself. [01:02:31] S1: But also incubating. Yeah. There's a lot going on. [01:02:33] S7: That's right. Yeah. So to start, we bought 13 different businesses so that we had a very broad set of engineering capabilities because that's the core and likewise in production. So we can build metallics, composites, electronic systems, large scale assemblies, etcetera. And then we started to also instantiate businesses on our own. We built a battery business, a drone product business, number of other businesses in the aerospace and robotics areas particularly. And so, yes, we have a a multipronged strategy because frankly, there's a lot of work to do and we need to do it in many ways if we're gonna catch up. Right? We don't have four years to do this.
01:02:33 · Miles Arnone, John Coogan
[01:02:33] S7: That's right. Yeah. So to start, we bought 13 different businesses so that we had a very broad set of engineering capabilities because that's the core and likewise in production. So we can build metallics, composites, electronic systems, large scale assemblies, etcetera. And then we started to also instantiate businesses on our own. We built a battery business, a drone product business, number of other businesses in the aerospace and robotics areas particularly. And so, yes, we have a a multipronged strategy because frankly, there's a lot of work to do and we need to do it in many ways if we're gonna catch up. Right? We don't have four years to do this. [01:03:09] S1: Can we double click on drone drone manufacturing? I remember a couple years ago hearing from a lot of the defense tech drone companies that they didn't have a... An onshore supplier for small drone motors for little quadrotors. Everything had been offshored. There was one company I found in Washington that had been sort of hollowed out and offshore their manufacturing, and I was sort of loosely pitching, oh, someone should do, like, the American Drone Motor Company of America or something, one of those, startups specifically focused on that. But what have you seen in the drone supply chain that is interesting or tractable or the or the the biggest unsolved problem? Like, what is the state of that supply chain? Because a lot of the actual founders, you know, they they can't exactly go out and say, like, oh, yeah. We're particularly in trouble on this part because they have a business to run.