01:03:09 · John Coogan, Miles Arnone
[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. [01:04:03] S7: It's a great point. So, actually, on the motors, which are called BLDC motors, which are used on these drones, that problem is largely being solved actually in a pretty short period of time. [01:04:12] S1: That's great. [01:04:12] S7: So it turns out you could import a lot of the machinery, the winding machinery, and so on, And a lot of the machining is quite conventional, and those are not ultra hard products to make. The actual trick there is the rare earth magnets in those motors. [01:04:24] S1: Oh, yeah.
01:04:24 · John Coogan, Miles Arnone
[01:04:24] S1: Oh, yeah. [01:04:25] S7: Today, that is still a very difficult supply chain issue. There are a number of companies looking to build that capability in The US, but the motors themselves [01:04:33] S1: Yeah. [01:04:33] S7: A whole bunch of companies ran into that space, and there's actually some danger there'll be overcapacity. [01:04:38] S1: Oh, interesting. Yeah. I remember looking up, like, how a drone motor is made, and it's, I I don't wanna say it's easy, but it's, like, a pretty simple to understand. Like, you wind the wire around the magnet. It spins, and it's something that if you had, like, any degree in engineering, you could sort of, like, work up to with the right machinery. So good to hear. That's gonna be solved. [01:04:59] S7: Well understood. And the capital needs to get into it are not ultra high. Right? [01:05:03] S1: That's great. [01:05:04] S7: Now as you get to bigger motors and bigger drones, like group three drones, larger drones, that changes. [01:05:08] S1: Mhmm.
01:05:08 · John Coogan, Miles Arnone
[01:05:08] S1: Mhmm. [01:05:09] S7: But the biggest challenge in drones is still that someone like DJI in China can make a group one. This is like a small quadcopter drone, and deliver it in The US for under $2,000, and a typical US made product is more like 5 to $8,000 using US based supply chain, electronics, etcetera. And as you can imagine, in a military context, it's all about affordable mass. So you want the maximum number of drones at the lowest possible price to win. And so that price difference is substantial. We've been developing actually what we call a drone core. Think of it as a platform that others can put various payloads on, whether those are energetics or various sensors or whatnot, that we think we can sell in The US wholesale for about $1,600 So the real radical change there is the development of the production system. How will it be manufactured? And developing that plant at the same time that you're developing the product. Because if you look at a traditional drone, again, even from China, they might have a 100 plus fasteners. And each of those fasteners requires a person or a robot or some kind of automation to make it. So if you can design a product that eliminates, for example, 100 plus of those fasteners, you can dramatically cut the production cost, the production time. That's the kind of thing that we need to do if we're going to compete with not just low labor costs, but everything costs less in China.
01:06:30 · Jordi Hays
[01:06:30] S0: How are you thinking about your supply chain? How much were robotics part of the pitch in 2020? Was that like, was that a core part of the first five years or was that always something that was a bit farther out? Because I'm thinking like, there's one situation where The US ends up and where we do sort of like, reshor manufacturing, but then we don't, we can't make the robots at scale, so then we have a new dependency. We have to... And we're, you know, so it feels like both those things, we need to have the manufacturing here, but also we need to make the robots here that will actually do the manufacturing.
01:07:06 · Miles Arnone, Jordi Hays
[01:07:06] S7: That's true, but I have a little different perspective on robots which may not be that popular, which is that there's a lot of hype around them. And the problem with robots is that they're attacking a pretty small part of the total production cost. It's largely the elimination of direct labor. And actually most of the cost and most of the time involves everything around that, a lot of waste. So the reality is that bringing robots in might take a few percentage points off your total cost at a very high capital expense. You're much better off, excuse me, trying to implement something like Toyota's lean production system to eliminate all the steps along the way that are wasteful, that don't add value to the product. But in The US, we're very techno centric and we like big step change improvements. And so robots are fun, and so we want robots instead of grinding it out and every week just pulling a quarter percent or a half a percent of the cost basis out by getting a little more efficient, which the Japanese, frankly and other cultures are better at. So we need to adopt more of that kind of ongoing bit by bit approach versus, oh, I'm gonna put robots here, get rid of all my labor, and all of a sudden I've solved my problems. That won't happen. [01:08:14] S0: Yeah. Yeah. No. It's very American to be like, well, we have this one trick that's gonna solve all of our problems. [01:08:20] S7: Yeah. AI will fix everything. AI is gonna solve all problems. Right?
01:08:20 · Miles Arnone, John Coogan
[01:08:20] S7: Yeah. AI will fix everything. AI is gonna solve all problems. Right? [01:08:24] S1: I like the way that sounds. Yeah. Alright. Take me through the Slate Auto story, the partnership, how that how that fits together with the company, and is there a plan to do more of those type of projects? It's a fascinating product and company that's very exciting, but interesting to see how you interface with it. [01:08:44] S7: Yeah. So Slate started as part of Rebuild and then spun out and Okay. Independently funded since that time. And they're developing a sub $25,000 electric pickup truck. [01:08:54] S1: Yeah. [01:08:55] S7: An interesting contrast to the motorcycle example you were talking about, the real value of the product there is not that it's electric versus ice. It's that it's cost effective. [01:09:04] S1: Yep. [01:09:05] S7: And there are a lot of people today who can't afford a new vehicle or even a reasonably well performing used vehicle. [01:09:10] S1: The average new car in America just hit over $50,000. I I was reading that today. It's... People are stretching out the payment plans to ten, twelve years for a new car. There's so much opportunity for for the lower end right now for sure. And so [01:09:24] S7: that's really something really cool. Go to the the parking lots of factories or burrito shops or whatever it is around the country and look at what people that work in those places have to drive, it's amazing that it makes it back and forth to work. [01:09:35] S1: 100%.