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.
00:47:00 · Olaf Hichwa, Ty Morse
[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. [00:48:00] S0: In your mind, when you're kind of doing these two different modes of like mass production or prototyping, which one's more fun?
00:48:07 · Olaf Hichwa
[00:48:07] S1: Well, I'm a masochist. So mass production is more fun for sure. Just the the weight of the problem is much bigger. Like, you see, you know, a station go down on the line, and then literally, like, a drone comes out of the building every two minutes. So you just... Like, drones just start stacking and stacking. You're like, we gotta fix it. We gotta fix it. And the the thing with production is that we pay for materials to come into the factory, obviously, and we only get paid when materials go out of the factory. But generally, the materials coming in don't stop. So you start piling up, and you just see like the the inventory piling, piling, piling and getting perpetually closer and closer to bankruptcy as the company's balance sheet just gets converted into parts. It's a stressful... It's a crazy stressful activity, but it's so fun. Like the the magnitude of the challenge is so real. And you have to be so worried about like every little part of the design that can get you. You know, there's so much, yeah, it'll fly. Like, we'll take the risk on in in prototyping, but in in production, you gotta be a lot more careful. It's like a game of three d chess. You gotta, you know, anything that can bite you will bite you. Of course, they both have their fun. You know, some engineers much prefer this stage of development where you you have more freedom to mess around, and we we have both. But if I had to pick one, it is production for sure.
00:49:24 · Ty Morse, Olaf Hichwa
[00:49:24] S0: I know that Elon has this idea of, like, walk to the red when he was going through production hell in 2018 for the Model three production ramp. I think there'd effectively be screens all over the factory of whatever was like slow on the line. Yeah. And he would just go to one of the red screens and then just unfuck the bottleneck and then go to the next red screen and unfuck that bottleneck and just continue doing that until the line worked. When you like go on the line and you see some bottleneck, how often are you like figuring out there's some part or process that you don't even need to be doing? [00:49:58] S1: I mean, all the time, like, you'd be really surprised how simple the solutions are to some of these problems. Right? Like, especially as the as the company grows, like, there are... There's a lot of juice to squeeze in in simple solutions. You know, you gotta try the the idiot checks. Do we even need this part? Can we delete this? Like, you know, who qualified this part? Show me the test data. Did we make sure this part works? But walking to the red, I'm a big fan of it. Like, Sorin and I, we both try very, very, very hard to put incredible people in charge of basically every responsibility we have by default. And then we spend a lot our time just unfucking. Like, in theory, if the company's running well, our calendar should be free. And we're able to just pick the most fucked area and dig there. That's that's of course not always possible. There's some things you want, you know, high touch on, but that's generally our philosophy.