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.
00:27:17 · Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca, John Collison
[00:27:17] S0: I can't comment. [00:27:18] S2: So I love this path, and it's something that I know your audience will love is that we have now started to see companies like this really get to be supply chain experts and see what's standing in the way of their 100x from today, And it really... It is a religion that came out of SpaceX and Tesla. [00:27:38] S0: My cofounders, literally all he works on is manufacturing. We have four cofounders. Cullen, all he does is pretty much manufacturing. Andriel is the same. One cofounder is, like, pretty much all on, like, manufacturing. Like, I think it's, like, just kind of default state. [00:27:51] S1: Saltwater in the ocean is a very hostile environment. What's harder than people realize when you're building a robot
00:27:51 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:27:51] S1: Saltwater in the ocean is a very hostile environment. What's harder than people realize when you're building a robot [00:27:56] S0: Corrosion that lives in the is like... And pressure are huge external forces, but corrosion, you can get around it by coating, You're doing like anodizing the surface of the metal, which gives it like some resistance. Pressure, again, you can mitigate... I mean, you know, going very deep sea, which would be 6,000 meters is what we call full ocean depth. I mean, the ocean goes to about 10,000 meters in its deepest parts, but full ocean depth in a technical term is the 6,000. That's very difficult. We operate currently in, like, 1,500... Up to 1,500 meters. I mean, we've been crush tested to 2,200 meters, but, you know, we're typically operating in that 1,500 meter range, which is where most of the important activity today happens. Yes. In the future, think much more will happen in the DC, particularly in critical minerals, but today a lot of the economic activity happens there. So pressure is one problem. I think the biggest problem, though, is comms underwater. [00:28:51] S1: I was going to ask that. Yeah. I yeah. Just... So how do you communicate with the Mako? [00:28:55] S0: A lot of it has to run locally. Like, you have to do a lot of sense because you can acoustically... [00:29:00] S1: Because communications are very low bandwidth. [00:29:02] S0: Yes. You can do, like, 10 kilobytes per second over, like, five kilometers. [00:29:08] S1: Over, like, HF or
00:29:08 · John Collison, Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca
[00:29:08] S1: Over, like, HF or [00:29:09] S0: what? Acoustically. Ping. Like a dial up modem. And then just, like, being far away from... Being far away from anything, you know, like, you're... Is very difficult. Like, you know, being far from someone that can repair you or connect and recharge you. So that's why the surface vehicle is such an important part of our stack because you pick it up, you put it on deck, it wirelessly charges. Leviathan rewards, it charges on water vehicles, and then connects us to the Internet so that we can get a live diagnostic on the vehicle, what's working, what's not working, and then if someone needs to come in and do an intervention. I mean, in the future, the Surface Craft will actually be able to repair the vehicle and have, like, replacement modules and kind of vending machine style. [00:29:49] S2: Surface vehicle's autonomous, too. [00:29:51] S0: That's Yeah, what and it's connected then to Starlink, so we can see, and Starlink is a huge enabling technology for us. That's one part of it. That's why we go for the Surface vehicle. Another thing is, yeah, we have around 100 times more onboard compute than any other autonomous underwater vehicle. We run a full NVIDIA fifteen ninety onboard with an Intel CPU, and that's been very important to our autonomy stack because, again, if you want to do anything intelligent robotically underwater, you need to have a lot... You need to be able to sense make to a large degree.