Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:20:25 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[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. [00:20:45] S1: Wow. We need a YouTube lecture of here's how physics works. Okay, very cool. So when you talk about China, this is ... What I imagine, what I think about now is watching the war in Ukraine and Russia, just like drones, just like how crazy and different the world is now that you can build these little drones that go and blow people up. Robots are a part of that. It's just like such a existential threat to every country now. The ability to build these things at scale. What's your advice? What should we do? What should we change to thrive in this future and not be in trouble?
00:21:21 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:21:21] S0: Well, you mentioned drones. It's another good example. You need essentially the same technology to make the rotor spin on a drone as you do to make an arm move on a robot. It's essentially the same base technology and supply chain. So we need to, at least on the military side, have an independent supply chain as much as possible. I think that's important. I think every other country should do that as well, but I don't think that's specific to us. I do feel that we need to reindustrialize the country significantly in order to be safe in a military sense. You really never know what's going to happen in the future and people that are your allies now may not be in the future. The allied West I think is going through a lot of geopolitical changes. There's a lot of shifting. And so I would really like to reteach ourselves how to make things at scale, how to make things at quantity, how to process raw materials, how to be more independent so that when COVID happens again or something else happens again, we're not in trouble and we're not unable to protect ourselves. [00:22:30] S1: When I think about it also, is Marc Andreessen had this visual on some podcast of, just imagine 100,000 drums just coming out of China just at us, what do we do? We're not prepared for that. I don't want to spend all our time on this dark stuff, but it's this real thing.
00:22:30 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:22:30] S1: When I think about it also, is Marc Andreessen had this visual on some podcast of, just imagine 100,000 drums just coming out of China just at us, what do we do? We're not prepared for that. I don't want to spend all our time on this dark stuff, but it's this real thing. [00:22:43] S0: Well, and Palmer Luckey is a friend of mine and we don't agree on everything, but I do think that we agree on some important aspects of how we need to respond here. I think he's right to say that we need to invest a lot more in drones than in aircraft carriers. I think that is this old way of thinking, and these are important components of the military, but it's an old way of thinking of, "Hey, we have this and we have this and we have this and our planes come off here." It's like, no, AI is changing everything and military technology is changing incredibly fast. And the place to look at that is Ukraine where drones are being changed and updated every day rapidly with 3D printing. And this is, I think, the future of where war is headed, unfortunately. And I view this as a very different era that we're entering into with very different ... This isn't new to anybody, but you're looking at what it costs for them to send out a missile and what it costs for us to stop it. And this is just you have to do the math every time. And right now we're losing on the math, which is fine for a certain amount of time, but the longer it goes, the less fine it is. [00:23:57] S1: Are you optimistic that we'll figure this out?