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
00:25:15 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:25:15] S1: So you're building supply a small scale with an eye towards a very large scale, and everything needs [00:25:19] S0: to have plan for how operate. We That's will open a facility next year that could be one of the largest by a number of units, underwater drone facilities, like factories in the And I think there's a decent... Like, right now, where our company is right now, our main problem is building things. We are saying no to contracts. We have more demand than we can supply. The things that we think about on a daily basis right now are not like, how do we sell morts, how do we build a factory, and how do we vertically integrate some of these parts of the stack that, for example, there is one part of our supply chain that we we kind of, like, baited out of the supplier how many of these components they make per year right now, and they make, like, a 100 to 200 per annum. I mean, like, that's, you know, like, there's no way that... We're we're hoping to make a few 100 vehicles next year. Yeah. Maybe a thousand. So it's like we kind of build on top of that.
00:26:18 · Chris Sacca, Will O'Brien, John Collison
[00:26:18] S2: We find this all the time. It's both within our companies and our own investment thesis is that as you start diving in, somebody brings you a cool idea, somebody brings you a cool prototype, they go ahead and it's cobbled together in the same way that Elon was getting components from Mercedes and shit like that to put the first one together. But then as you start scaling, you start to notice bottlenecks, whether they're intrinsic to the way you're building something or to rolling it out, etcetera. And then with each of those bottlenecks, you now know there's an opportunity to resolve that. It's not unlike what you guys have done with Stripe, but... So we've done that in our own investing thesis where we start to see, you know, grid resiliency as a thing and then you start to see like, oh, shit. [00:26:56] S0: You know what? We know [00:26:57] S2: what there's a shortage of? It's transformers. And so we've got these guys, Giga, who taught themselves how to build transformers in their backyard using YouTube videos. Somehow nobody died. And they went to China to see how China manufactures them and brought that back. I love fucking... [00:27:11] S1: I know they're making... [00:27:11] S0: And now [00:27:12] S2: they make transformers in a way that's not all hand spun. [00:27:14] S0: It's a big... We definitely have done that either. [00:27:16] S2: And so... Yeah. And so... [00:27:17] S0: I can't comment.