Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:15:59 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:15:59] S1: That is so interesting. It's funny to hear that at the same time there's these nunchuck wielding robots in China doing dances with other folks. I've never thought about just that part of it, the impact they can have if they go awry. I want to come back to that, but just like timeline wise, what's your sense realistically when humanoid robots are walking around the streets in people's homes at scale? [00:16:22] S0: At scale is the problem in my mind. At scale is a huge challenge. Now for me, my background at scale means millions usually, but let's even say hundreds of thousands. You've got to get a good design that's running. Then you've got to make it reliable enough that it can keep running day to day to day without a lot of human intervention or repair and that's its own problem. But the first problem you have is supply chain and this is going to be something that I hope that we can talk about a little bit more, but every single part that goes into that robot's coming from somewhere and many of these parts may become more restricted or difficult to make and it may be harder to assemble the subassemblies and the meaningful parts of the robot here in this country. So there's a very complex supply chain dependency right now on robots like humanoids, but also other robots that we have to figure out. And a lot of people are trying to move production here to the United States, which is very challenging because we don't have great actuator companies here yet, for example.
00:16:22 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:16:22] S0: At scale is the problem in my mind. At scale is a huge challenge. Now for me, my background at scale means millions usually, but let's even say hundreds of thousands. You've got to get a good design that's running. Then you've got to make it reliable enough that it can keep running day to day to day without a lot of human intervention or repair and that's its own problem. But the first problem you have is supply chain and this is going to be something that I hope that we can talk about a little bit more, but every single part that goes into that robot's coming from somewhere and many of these parts may become more restricted or difficult to make and it may be harder to assemble the subassemblies and the meaningful parts of the robot here in this country. So there's a very complex supply chain dependency right now on robots like humanoids, but also other robots that we have to figure out. And a lot of people are trying to move production here to the United States, which is very challenging because we don't have great actuator companies here yet, for example. [00:17:32] S1: And the actuator is the little arm, I don't know ... How would you describe an actuator to a non-robotics person? [00:17:37] S0: Yeah, the actuator is the motor. So you put power into it, electricity into it, and you get motion out of it. [00:17:38] S1: Cool. [00:17:44] S0: And most of these robots have a rotating rotor essentially that then has gearing on it that then powers the limb or powers the head or the fingers or whatever else. So they could be small, they could be large.
00:17:44 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:17:44] S0: And most of these robots have a rotating rotor essentially that then has gearing on it that then powers the limb or powers the head or the fingers or whatever else. So they could be small, they could be large. [00:17:58] S1: Okay, awesome. I hear the word a lot and I'm like, " I don't know exactly what it means." So thank you for explaining it. I want to talk about the supply chain stuff more because I know you think a lot about this,- what's the state of the union on the supply chain for say robotics? What's going on? What are the pieces? What are the challenges?
00:17:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:17:58] S1: Okay, awesome. I hear the word a lot and I'm like, " I don't know exactly what it means." So thank you for explaining it. I want to talk about the supply chain stuff more because I know you think a lot about this,- what's the state of the union on the supply chain for say robotics? What's going on? What are the pieces? What are the challenges? [00:18:13] S0: So the way to think about it is you can start with raw materials and magnets is a good place to start. So we need to be able to get the magnets, the raw magnets, for example. Then we need to be able to process them, then we need to be able to integrate them into actuators and build the actuators around them. Then we need to be able to integrate those actuators into subcomponents or robots themselves. And each layer of this chain has essentially been outsourced over the last 25 years to countries like China, like Japan, like Korea. And full transparency, I've been part of that transfer of engineering knowledge to Asia. In Asia, the expertise has historically been scale and being able to build a lot of these parts at lower prices. We've had this kind of deal across these borders that this is how we're going to operate for the most part. Now, of course, there's things we make in this country still and of course there's design and AI that's made in Asia, but that's essentially where things have been for a long time. And in order to have a safe supply chain, we need to start to work on having some independence in these layers and these stacks.
00:18:13 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:18:13] S0: So the way to think about it is you can start with raw materials and magnets is a good place to start. So we need to be able to get the magnets, the raw magnets, for example. Then we need to be able to process them, then we need to be able to integrate them into actuators and build the actuators around them. Then we need to be able to integrate those actuators into subcomponents or robots themselves. And each layer of this chain has essentially been outsourced over the last 25 years to countries like China, like Japan, like Korea. And full transparency, I've been part of that transfer of engineering knowledge to Asia. In Asia, the expertise has historically been scale and being able to build a lot of these parts at lower prices. We've had this kind of deal across these borders that this is how we're going to operate for the most part. Now, of course, there's things we make in this country still and of course there's design and AI that's made in Asia, but that's essentially where things have been for a long time. And in order to have a safe supply chain, we need to start to work on having some independence in these layers and these stacks. [00:19:24] S1: And it's interesting that your focus is on these actuators. Is that the bottleneck, this very specific part of a robot?
00:19:24 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:19:24] S1: And it's interesting that your focus is on these actuators. Is that the bottleneck, this very specific part of a robot? [00:19:30] S0: It might be. So if we can't get the magnets, then we have to design new actuator types that maybe use different materials that may be larger that may not be as efficient in space. So that's important. And then the actuators themselves are important because if for some reason we can't buy them, then we don't get to make robots. So it's foundational. There are some foundational technologies like this all backed by material science, essentially breakthroughs. There's batteries of course. There's actuators. The raw parts, the die-cast parts, the machine parts are less critical. We think we can get those, but I think everyone, not just in this country, but around the world is starting to think about supply chain because you have these disruptions, whether it's COVID or war and you see how quickly things change. [00:20:20] S1: Okay, stupid question. Why magnets? Why is that a part of the supply chain? Why do we need magnets? [00:20:25] S0: Yeah, so it's a great question. So you have a ring of magnets that are polar opposites and they go like this around the ring and then you have something in the center that rotates. And the way it rotates is you have alternating current essentially, and so the magnets make the rotor spin.