00:41:53 · Olaf Hichwa
[00:41:53] S1: So when when we were making like hundreds of drones a month, we got to just not use connectors and direct solder. You just take a wire and a board and melt the two together essentially. That was a huge... Like, it just makes everything simpler and tighter. You now have to train users very carefully, and they have to, you know, get lucky to make sure that solder joint is is up to quality, etcetera etcetera. Obviously, that doesn't scale, so we were like, okay, must not have any manual solder joints. That was a big step forward. Most FTVs, even today in Ukraine, have manual solder joints. So we we avoided that. When you get up to, you know, I'd say high hundreds to thousands of units a month, that's where you have to get really worried about things like Pokeyoke. You have to make sure that if you can... Like, there's no way to install a part wrong, you know. You'll notice the the two camera slots don't have the same interface because you could flip them and then things would be messed up. Little little details like that are really important. Like, the two sides of a connector, they either have to be reversible or they have to use a different connector on each side. There's all these, like, little extra gotchas. When you get up to, like, the thousands of drones per month, like, you know, five, 10,000, this is where you have to be really smart about your supply chain. Like, we could buy every chip in America of a certain part number that goes in Archer and then not have enough to sustain a month or two of production. Because it's just like all the distributors combined only have, you know, 5,000, 10,000 chips. So now you have to design around the manufacturer, the like, know, TSMC's lead time in Taiwan. Or better, you have to design two different boards. You have to design board A, do all the work to design board a, and you have to start again with board b, and it has all the same requirements as board a. It must behave exactly the same, but you have the simple gotcha of you can't use any parts from board a. You have to figure it all out again with different engineering strategies, a different microprocessor, that kind of thing. That's the kind of like hidden gotchas. The product seems the same. Hey, you know, my iPhone seems the same as every other iPhone.
00:44:05 · Olaf Hichwa, Ty Morse
But there's actually a bunch of different variants of iPhones that use different memory chips and and that kind of thing. That way you can have [00:44:13] S0: It'll have stable like almost supply exactly the same performance and stuff. [00:44:15] S1: Yep. Yeah. And they look identical. Like, you you don't even see the work that that, you know, team, the entire team of engineers put through to redo all the work of design a, have it function exactly the same, and not use any of the same parts. And these are, like, just a few of the kinda, like, really hidden gotchas that it takes to get to a million a year of something. And I think that's why, like, you know, no other defense company in America makes a million of anything that isn't ammunition. Like, make a million a year of bullets. Name another product that is made in a million units per year. Starlink terminals, think? Starlink terminals, totally. I think it's like [00:44:52] S0: 5,000,000 a year [00:44:53] S1: or something. Yeah. Mean, Starlink is is is breaking records there. Wouldn't... Well, they don't make a million star shields per year. I wouldn't consider that a defense item. The Starlink terminal production is insane. It's it's a consumer product, but it's probably the only really full fledged example of China beating consumer electronics production, like consumer electronics production that would beat China here in America. That team is incredible. We... We're very lucky to have engineers that have worked on that production line. The Starlink user terminal line is is an incredible, incredible feat for America.
00:44:53 · Olaf Hichwa, Ty Morse
[00:44:53] S1: or something. Yeah. Mean, Starlink is is is breaking records there. Wouldn't... Well, they don't make a million star shields per year. I wouldn't consider that a defense item. The Starlink terminal production is insane. It's it's a consumer product, but it's probably the only really full fledged example of China beating consumer electronics production, like consumer electronics production that would beat China here in America. That team is incredible. We... We're very lucky to have engineers that have worked on that production line. The Starlink user terminal line is is an incredible, incredible feat for America. [00:45:31] S0: For the people that come from that line and come work at Neros, how do they think differently than everyone else from everywhere else?
00:45:31 · Ty Morse, Olaf Hichwa
[00:45:31] S0: For the people that come from that line and come work at Neros, how do they think differently than everyone else from everywhere else? [00:45:39] S1: I've been told, like Elon always said, like, we're gonna make this line run so fast that we're gonna have to consider the aerodynamic drag on units as they whiz through the production line. That's how fast this thing is gonna run. Like, you know, they'll be in design reviews and, you know, we'll talk about, you know, manually aligning a connector to plug in. It's like, no. Like, it's completely unserious. This this needs to have, you know, alignment tools or or just not exist at all. The kind of bar for, like, when a design is done and ready is just so high. And, like, also the understanding of, like, getting the thing to work once is one tenth of the work. Like, is so simple to, you know, build the drone in the basement and get it fly, get it to fly. The the the challenge is in the iterations to get it manufacturable. Those those learnings are are really... They they come with time. And we're we're really lucky to have great people that have had that time.
00:45:39 · Olaf Hichwa, Ty Morse
[00:45:39] S1: I've been told, like Elon always said, like, we're gonna make this line run so fast that we're gonna have to consider the aerodynamic drag on units as they whiz through the production line. That's how fast this thing is gonna run. Like, you know, they'll be in design reviews and, you know, we'll talk about, you know, manually aligning a connector to plug in. It's like, no. Like, it's completely unserious. This this needs to have, you know, alignment tools or or just not exist at all. The kind of bar for, like, when a design is done and ready is just so high. And, like, also the understanding of, like, getting the thing to work once is one tenth of the work. Like, is so simple to, you know, build the drone in the basement and get it fly, get it to fly. The the the challenge is in the iterations to get it manufacturable. Those those learnings are are really... They they come with time. And we're we're really lucky to have great people that have had that time. [00:46:33] S0: One of the things I think I asked you last time was this idea of you know kind of where the puck is going, and you want to be able to ship the best thing that you can ship at any given time. But obviously, you can't, like, immediately make an improvement and then scale that across, you know, your your units. Is it improving with scale? Like, are you getting better at shortening the the the time between making an improvement and having it in users' hands? Or is that getting longer? Like how does that change?
00:46:33 · Ty Morse, Olaf Hichwa
[00:46:33] S0: One of the things I think I asked you last time was this idea of you know kind of where the puck is going, and you want to be able to ship the best thing that you can ship at any given time. But obviously, you can't, like, immediately make an improvement and then scale that across, you know, your your units. Is it improving with scale? Like, are you getting better at shortening the the the time between making an improvement and having it in users' hands? Or is that getting longer? Like how does that change? [00:47:00] S1: In some ways it's getting shorter, in some ways it's getting longer. I'd say we're engineering faster at this point. Like one of the things I really love about engineering at Neros is that it is a bunch of like really small teams that are all behaving like an early start up. You know, we're only three years old, so we have a lot of that DNA in us. But also we're, like, perpetually terrified of big company bullshit. So we we keep teams that are super, super tight that, you know, iterate quickly and are able to ship quickly. With that being said, big production lines, they don't transition overnight. It is a it is a big ship to steer when you're making these kinds of quantities. Starlink doesn't come out with 10,000 variants, and and it builds one thing and it builds one thing well. So I'd say we're... We are faster at iterating on new designs and kind of making... Adding features when you're in engineering land. Like prototyping. Exactly. Faster prototyping, but slower mass production changes. The the line is fixed.