Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:31:31 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Rob Wachen, Gavin Uberti
[00:31:31] S0: Do have a name for them? So Brian's a legend. What's what's Sanford? [00:31:33] S3: Yeah. We say chips on shoulders put chips in data centers. Yeah. Sanford and Gavin in in high school were world robotics champions and Sanford was finishing his senior year of college. And we called him up a couple years ago and we said, hey, can you come check out what we're doing? We need some help on the platform side. He comes for a week and we say, can you build a cold plate this week? And if you asked, like, any thermal engineer, anything like that, they they would think you're just, like, totally naive. Right? I mean, these things take months to do. And, like, to be clear, they do. But you can make real progress in a week if you if you put your mind to it and you think it's possible. And he built a contraption in a week that, like, actually derisked, like, a pretty key power question we had. And you put those two together, and they've done incredible things. One is not possible without the other because you need the extremely driven people that just keep asking why and don't know where the bodies are buried to, like, take tons of aggressive risks, and then you need the people who've seen scale and still have the startup scrappy mentality to help them along [00:32:32] S0: the way. So it's really the legends plus some naivete, law, first principles type talent. It's not just that you have both in the company, it's that they're working together. [00:32:39] S1: That's right. If I
00:32:39 · Gavin Uberti, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:32:39] S1: That's right. If I [00:32:40] S0: think about that funnel, anything else more interesting to say about how much better you've gotten at recruiting and why those metrics keep getting better? [00:32:47] S1: One of the shocking things is, I wish you being such a contrarian bet, kind of self selects, that, like, if you're the kind of person who is somewhat opportunistic, shouldn't go join whatever the hot company is or rather than go ahead and do deep diligence, you will not come work here, And it's one of the things I worry about as we announce more and more of the product and its specs, we may lose some of this if we're not very careful.
00:32:47 · Gavin Uberti, Rob Wachen
[00:32:47] S1: One of the shocking things is, I wish you being such a contrarian bet, kind of self selects, that, like, if you're the kind of person who is somewhat opportunistic, shouldn't go join whatever the hot company is or rather than go ahead and do deep diligence, you will not come work here, And it's one of the things I worry about as we announce more and more of the product and its specs, we may lose some of this if we're not very careful. [00:33:08] S3: You kind of have to be sick in the head to join our company. When you think about it on paper, it's like you, a person who is probably a very accomplished engineer, making a good amount of money, it's liquid, it's predictable somewhere else, you're going to convince your family to move to San Jose and live in this apartment on this housing program for the semiconductor company run by two, what, twenty four year olds now, that's pre product that is going against the biggest companies in the world and the most supply constrained environment ever created with a design that they're saying is not going to be, like, 10% better, but it's gonna be 10 x better. Something must be wrong with you to do that. People are just wired differently here that they, like, really want to not prove people wrong who don't believe, but prove people right who do believe. They just take it personally. And, you know, that's really fun to find those people. And, frankly, just the nature of the company makes it very easy to whittle out the people who aren't like that.
00:33:59 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:33:59] S0: One of the very first things you and I talked about, Rob, was I started asking about Sohu, which is the name of the first product here. And you said we can talk about that in great detail, but the thing you should know is that what we're really focused on is building a machine that can, at scale, produce these things and generations of them as efficiently at the highest possible quality level. So we want to build like the company or the machine that is the company is the thing that will produce this thing and then subsequent things. So I'd like to talk about a few principles or cornerstones of the company. You've alluded to some of them. You've said velocity. You've said vertical integration. These have become more popular topics. Parallelization is something maybe that we should talk about. But I'm especially interested in your guys' willingness to take huge risk to go faster. Maybe tell your favorite story about why this is the philosophy, what it's allowed you to do that maybe other companies haven't done. There's a number of stories here,
00:34:52 · Gavin Uberti
[00:34:52] S1: but one of my favorites is there was a time where we were getting close to taping out the chip. We realized, wait a minute, one of our vendors is way, way behind schedule. And we had two very bad options. One option, just keep the current vendor and push our timelines up by on the order of a year. Another option was to push vendors, start over and also get push timelines out by a year. Neither of these was a good option. So we had to go look for option number three. And what that was, was we figured out they're all in Bangalore. They think they're actually going and doing the work. We went out and shipped a dozen of our top engineers across the world to Bangalore for six months. So I was there as well. I lived in Bangalore for four and a half months personally and every morning, we'd go ahead and walk across the crazy busy Bangalore streets into the office, We'd be the first ones in. We'd go out and build a wide variety of tools, both things like, hey, auditing a huge amount of the code that was going in, building a bunch of tools as well to make this go even faster, making sure we're making the right design decisions on the spot right there. No to allow back and forth, go ahead and decide immediately. And then at 1AM, we'd go walk back through the now empty Bangalore streets and do it all again the next day.
00:36:03 · Rob Wachen, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:36:03] S3: We still had a bunch of the team in The US. We ran these twelve hour on each side handoffs where we had twenty four hour development cycle where at 8AM and 8PM every day, we'd all get on the Zoom, we'd share all the data, and we'd say, when I wake up, like, this must be done. Like, we must get this chip out. And it was extremely intense. At the same time, we saw other chips at the same stage as us with that same vendor that ended up taking years that still aren't out today. They still haven't even taped out today. And it's that level of extreme urgency that's required to bring products to market. What is the key [00:36:34] S0: to doing this? Well, this has become a trope because of Elon mostly that, like, his special skill and others that seek to emulate him would try to do this too, is figure out what the binding constraint is and just flood the zone personally on that thing, which is kind of like going to Bangalore or something. It seems like this is a central tenet of the business and of any business that's going to do this kind of vertical integration. What's the key to doing that well? Like, again, what have you learned about that specific act?