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.
00:29:51 · Will O'Brien, John Collison
[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. [00:30:21] S1: Okay, but basically, does the Mako, if it's doing some mapping or whatever, do you send it down with a fully built plan and program, and it's basically... It is running the full loop of sensing and deciding locally on the GPUs on the device? [00:30:36] S0: Yeah. Right now, the autonomy is relatively rudimentary. We haven't gotten into very complex kind of autonomy behaviors just yet, but not many of our tasks were recorded just yet, but yes. [00:30:48] S1: But to the extent that it is autonomous, [00:30:50] S0: it's fully locally autonomous. Yeah, exactly. It will be like, draw a polygon that's like map this area. Okay. Auto generates a lawnmower track. Mhmm. And then it'll have some, like, rudimentary, okay, well, if I see a rock, let me just, like, go above that. Or if I see, like, something else, go around it. [00:31:05] S1: Yeah. And then what applications are you having most success with with the robot right now? Like, what are you selling the robot for?
00:31:05 · John Collison, Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca
[00:31:05] S1: Yeah. And then what applications are you having most success with with the robot right now? Like, what are you selling the robot for? [00:31:14] S0: Right now, I mean, there's kind of two domains in which we've had, like, a lot of success in the last year. So nature was kind of what we did and focused on kinda first year, last year, being the second year of the business, we kind of started to look at other use cases. Last year we got our first contract with the US Navy, and we got our first contract with an offshore wind developer as well. So US Navy was actually... You know, we were doing mine countermeasures, finding mines and hunting mines before it was cool, you know, before before the Straits Of Hermes popped off. [00:31:47] S2: So we were we were [00:31:47] S0: working on some work related to that. And then the offshore... [00:31:51] S2: I haven't heard Straits Of Hermes popped off. That's pretty sweet. Way to appeal to his younger listeners.
00:31:51 · Chris Sacca, Will O'Brien, John Collison
[00:31:51] S2: I haven't heard Straits Of Hermes popped off. That's pretty sweet. Way to appeal to his younger listeners. [00:31:57] S0: And then the the offshore wind contract was, you know, where... Actually, there's this problem in California where they're trying to build a floating offshore wind where they need to... One of the objections to the floating offshore wind is that you put these power cables in the water, they attract abandoned fishing lines, the fishing lines then are what catch dolphins and whales and these sorts of things, and that's one of the biggest obstructions to offshore wind in California. And so it's like, could you build... We're building this sensing system, like a surface underwater vehicle that will map these cables on a daily basis, look at their structural integrity, and see if they're in good condition, and also if they're getting lines cut on them. If there's a line cut on them, we have a... We're building an implement that will cut the fishing lines off of the floating offshore wind lines. [00:32:42] S1: I'm sorry. Why are the offshore wind turbines getting caught up in lines a problem? [00:32:47] S0: Basically, when you build a floating offshore wind terminal and then you have the cable running up, that cable's in the water. I see. And just usually... [00:32:53] S1: It's the power cable that's feeding the