00:18:59 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:18:59] S1: How did you end up in the Chinese prison? [00:19:01] S0: This is the topic. I was in a I wanna get back to the robots. You know, there was an interesting time in the 2010s where China's on this, like, ascendant path or whatever, and my mom was like, Well, you gotta learn Mandarin. So I go to Shanghai. I'm about 16 years of age, 15 years of age. I go there, and we end up in, like, some night market, and we were there a week before, and we go back a week later, and they falsely accuse us of shoplifting, and I think it was this kind of scam they had. Like, you know, they would bring these kind of white kids or something like in, and then [00:19:35] S1: This scam who had? [00:19:36] S0: People in the thing. What would happen is when they'd accuse you of the crime... [00:19:41] S1: They have to pay a fine on the spot. [00:19:42] S0: You have to pay a... Well, you get brought to the prison station or the police station, and you remember, this is the time before, like, instant money sending, [00:19:50] S1: right?
00:19:50 · John Collison, Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca, S3
[00:19:50] S1: right? [00:19:52] S0: You know, historians of The Americas Terms the time. Crazy time. So we went to Western Union, the money, and, like, that takes, you know, it's like China's, whatever, nine hours ahead of Ireland, it's, like, 10:00 at night, so my mom's not awake. So, you know, I ring her, whatever, three in the morning, you know, whenever she's up, Or, you know, it's nine in the morning, Ireland time, she's awake, because I'm like, well, mean, like, I'm in this prison cell, Shanghai prison. Can you, like, send Western Union me the money and get me out? She's like, okay. Alright. So they, you know, the value of the phones that we shoplifted. [00:20:22] S1: Of course, nowadays, they just write it off as a deep fake AI scam [00:20:25] S0: like I was [00:20:25] S2: gonna say, now that's an eleven Labs call. That's an eleven Labs call for sure. I've had to build a safe word with my family. [00:20:31] S0: Send them to me in iTunes, true. Yeah. Exactly. [00:20:37] S1: One of my favorite parts of Stripe is Works in Progress, our magazine dedicated to new ideas driving economic and technological progress. Take the latest issue landing on doorsteps right now. It covers how China's different cities compete to grow their local economies, why regulations are holding up ways to eradicate mosquito borne diseases, how hedge funds make millions predicting the outcomes of drug trials, and about [00:20:58] S3: a 130 pages of other
00:20:58 · S3, John Collison, Chris Sacca
[00:20:58] S3: a 130 pages of other [00:20:59] S1: fascinating stuff you're unlikely to read elsewhere. And we want the works in progress to be as beautiful to look at and hold as it is interesting to read. And call me biased, but I think it's the most beautiful magazine in print today. To read works in progress online or to get the print edition delivered to your door, head to worksinprogress.co. [00:21:19] S2: As I look back, and I did, I looked back at the original pitch you came to us with, but as I look back at that and think about how you from day one were thinking about all of the ways this company could, all the markets it could address and what it could do, but at the core of it was making the vehicle. If you had come to a venture capitalist ten, twelve years ago, fuck, for some, maybe six years ago, and said, Hey, we are going to verticalize manufacturing. We are actually going to build things in The US. We are not going to outsource them to Foxconn or Shenzhen or whatever, and so we're going to... For those components that seem like the supply chain might be dicey, we will literally make them from scratch so that we control everything, the entire vertical stack of our device. That would get you shown to the parking lot. [00:22:13] S1: So how verticalized are you guys, and where'd you start? Where are going to...
00:22:13 · John Collison, Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca
[00:22:13] S1: So how verticalized are you guys, and where'd you start? Where are going to... [00:22:17] S0: It's this kind of iterative process that we've kind of... You know, the first vehicle has maybe 80% pieces off the shelf, and we're on generation five now, and the next generation, particularly over the course of the next year, we're going to bring a lot of it in house. So to make an underwater drone, you can kind of break it up into the mech, the elec, and the software. The software, all of that is pretty much from scratch in house. We're not really building on top of any other primitives, we've kind of built it up from the ground up because we're building a very different type of vehicle. The modularity requires a lot of interesting things. So then, you know... [00:22:51] S1: But presumably, there's hardware actuation frameworks that you use, like... [00:22:54] S0: Yeah. Like, there is things, but frankly, we've kind of just, like, issued a lot of them. There's things you can... There's, like, OpenRAS, and there's other, like... Yeah, there's [00:23:05] S2: a few different ones, but,
00:23:05 · Chris Sacca, Will O'Brien, John Collison
[00:23:05] S2: a few different ones, but, [00:23:07] S0: yeah, we're issuing a lot of them and building a lot them from the ground up because our vehicle looks a lot different to a lot of other underwater robots. And then there's the Elek, so in that, you've got sensors and then the internals of the vehicle. So a lot of the, you know, if we talk about the sensors and that sort of thing, there's you know, how do you perceive? You know, it's like you're typically using a sonar system of some description. Again, right now, we're buying them off the shelf, our sonar systems, but we're kind of just hiring and building up our acoustics team now to start building them in house and sell for next year. Then the navigation stack as a part of this kind of, like, part of the vehicle. There's inertial navigation systems. Again, right now, we buy them off the shelf, but we've got internal prototypes that we're gonna start building in house ourselves and replace these existing suppliers. [00:23:55] S1: It seems very hard to build an inertial navigation system in house. Right now, an inertial navigation system works, and then...
00:23:55 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:23:55] S1: It seems very hard to build an inertial navigation system in house. Right now, an inertial navigation system works, and then... [00:24:00] S0: There's different ways of building them. You know, you've got, like, fiber optic gyros, which use, like, one way. You've got MEMS sensors, are in your iPhone or whatever, that are kind of like accelerometers that you can use as well, and we're... So I won't go into how we're building ours, yes, initial but prototypes. Initial prototypes, and our initial one is put it at a fraction of the price of the very expensive long lead time supplier that we're using right now and building our supply chain that we could scale. [00:24:34] S1: Well, but I'm curious, why build your own inertial navigation? Is it cost? Is it lead time? Is it, like, ultimately you need to get the device the robot? [00:24:43] S0: Scale. For us, scale, lead time. You know, right... There's about 20,000,000 aerial drones built every year. There's maybe 1,000 to 2,000 underwater drones. For us to really fully manifest our vision, we need to be building millions of underwater drones. Therefore, I need to... We look at supply chains, and I'm like, can we build on that supply chain? So insofar as we can, we try to build as much on top of electronic vehicle supply chains, drone supply chains, where we have to buy from somewhere else, or consumer electronics supply chains, where things are made in the order of millions and not maritime [00:25:15] S1: So you're building supply a small scale with an eye towards a very large scale, and everything needs