YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Power

lines on the record: 75
first: 2022-11-17
most recent: 2022-11-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Things and that is the thing that people don't realize is yeah it's not a capital problem, it's a time and investment problem and you have to have the base layers there to be able to execute the hard stuff.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what the impact of that is time. So, you know, you look at the semiconductor problem and go, how fast can we reach those semiconductor? The reality is the Biden administration gives Intel $50 billion. That's arguably the hardest. That's the heavy work division of manufacturing. And the talent doesn't exist. You can't go and hire 20,000 people or even a thousand people that know how to go and execute that construction, how to go engineer that factory, how to go run that factory. They just simply don't exist. And you cannot simply go and train someone up in even three years to go from like junior college, you know, track and field to like winning the Olympics. It doesn't work like that. You need the coaches, you need the entire cultural infrastructure. So that's really what we lost when we outsourced manufacturing in the 80s is there is no talent base that is generative of the genius types of people that can actually go and do all these advanced things.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To go below a trillion dollars, and with the Olympics, it doesn't work like that. That takes years and years of training. You need to get people when they're 14, you need to train them up. Like, it's a cultural thing. Like, why would a kid want to go do sports in the first place? And in America, we have that problem solved because America loves sports like the Romans did, and it makes sense. So you think about that from a manufacturing talent level, you know, you want to go solve rocketry or”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It won't. And the most important bit is talent. So if you think about software engineering and you want to solve the problem of how can we produce more data scientists or people that are capable of working at OpenAI or something like that, which is arguably like the top tier of software engineering. The way that you get more of those people is having this base layer of application developers and then front and back end engineers and then more hardcore back-end engineers and then SREs and the data scientists and maybe you have a million people you produce like a thousand really incredible people in these like domain spaces like science, knowledge stacks on each other you have this talent competition and you produce amazing people in these fields like US doesn't have the track team that goes and wins the Olympics unless we have you know thousands of colleges that are really competitive for track and field that's how it goes and to take that sports example you can't just start from a cult start and say well we want to be competitive we want”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even if you're an EA type of person or you're a pacifist or whatever, or if you're into climate change, or pick any industry that you think is important, good luck running compute on GPT-3 if there are no chips. Or China takes Taiwan and then the only chips you can buy have like a bug in them's not that hard to take a line to draw on. It's like very serious”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You caught with your hands behind your back and you can't respond, and everyone knows you can't respond, and then basically everyone can run around doing whatever they want. And that's how you get the collapse of society. As soon as someone realizes the police force are incompetent, you get a bunch of bad actors that creep through the system. And that's basically the mistake that we're at, but not just kind of like a localized bar fire level, but how the globe operates in general. So, yeah, it's incredibly scary, and I think people are going to get a really hard wake up call in the next two years.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Million dollars in lasers or hypersonic missiles is the fear that the response from America is so great that we will win any conflict that's put ahead of us. And what our adversaries are starting to realize faster than we are realizing is that our lethality is more like a three out of ten versus an eight or a ten out of ten. As VCs know, risk happens slowly and then all at once. And by the time you realize the risk and it starts cascading, it's kind of too late to respond. The difference between this time around and last time around was, yes, risk happened slowly and then very quickly in World War II, but at least we had the fundamental culture and infrastructure of a defense industrial base to be able to go, we're making great cars, so let's shift that to making fighter jet chassis and we're kind of okay in the response time might be 18 months to two years. When you don't have that fundamental infrastructure, you know, the response time can be 10 years and you're in a really serious position.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite serious. And to go from the state that we are currently in where it's the tail end of Pax Americana and Peace Through Strength to a highly conflicted world is a really scary position. And it's not going to be a matter of like, oh, we go to war. It's like, oh, we go to war and we lose. And also we don't have food and the American consumer can't buy an iPhone for less than $10,000 or have laptops at all. Imagine if GPS went down. Imagine if we just didn't have GPS, right? So there are obvious impacts of that in terms of being able to drive or whatever. But all the airlines run on GPS, all the train systems run on GPS. Our ability to coordinate military conflict relies on GPS. But there are like less than 50 GPS satellites. And all of those can be shut out of the air pretty easily. And all it's preventing, you know, some adversary doing that and basically collapsing Western civilization in one fell sloop, taking out less than 10 satellites for the cost of maybe two or three.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When a great power competitor finds out before you find out that you're actually a three out of ten. So the problem with everyone thinking advanced manufacturing is in a really good place is that we don't go fix the problem because culturally everyone thinks it's fine. The roads are getting paved. Fighter jets get made. If we go into a conflict, we're fine. In reality, we're probably so far away from doing that that if we have one conflict with China where we expend most of our ballistics inventory, we might not be able to remake it for like five years and we're basically standing around with our hands tied behind our backs. And when there is not one or two great powers in the globe kind of keeping the peace, that's when you get fragmentations and you get death spots and dictators pushing the boundaries of what can be done in their country. And then also they see weakness and then they start moving into invasions of other countries and we get back to this kind of multipolar fragmented world. So it really is...”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that construct of a Bafite relies on impressions and kind of social trade-offs that like, hey, enough people have seen their friend getting beaten up by a bouncer, so I'm probably not going to even test that assumption that this is a real thing. Now, the reality, of course, is that most police officers and most bouncers are probably incompetent, can probably get taken out by someone relatively competent as a civilian, but we have enough social construct around the concept that that is a really dumb idea that no one wants to take the risk. And it's what I describe it in defense land is a lethality mirage. And a lethality mirage is basically, everyone else's impression of you is that you're a 10 out of 10 lethals that they're absolutely not going to fuck with you. And then maybe you lose one small conflict and someone goes, well, hold on, like, maybe these guys aren't so scary as we thought they were. And in reality, I think we're about a three out of ten. And the real danger comes.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“View of geopolitics is Russia bad. You don't learn those lessons. And as a younger person, you don't realize that unless we quote unquote keep the rose paved, like this can all fall over very, very quickly. So if you run the scenario of saying, okay, right now, basically, we are successful because we are the world's police and whether we should play that role or not is obviously up for debate. But the reality is that we are fine culturally because everyone understands that if you fuck with America, we will put a miss all over your head and you're dead. Or if we go into a great power conflict, we have enough logistics and infrastructure to go and win that conflict or release. Be scary enough of that conflict never exists in the first place. And the analogy I like to tell people is, you know, bar fights happen when both people mispredict their ability to win the fight.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unless we solve this problem, I think the country and our way of life is existential risk. And the analogy I give to people is if you're living in a small town or something like that, we've built up 200 layers of abstractions in society so that you can be an artist or you can be a painter or you can be in finance or in crypto or making video games or whatever happens to be. And the reality of the world is that 200 years ago, you know, we were killing each other over food and it's a miracle in the first place that we're here and that society is relatively stable and like the roads get paved. People forget because they grow up in America that it's so successful that like they don't have to worry about having a bulletproof car otherwise if you have more than like a hundred thousand dollar net worth someone in the gang might try and steal your daughter, which for the rest of the world is like a reality, right? But because America is so isolated culturally, most Americans”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a couple of years ago, but there are many, many examples of this. We're trying to move the production of one part from one facility to another in a different state, right? And part of making this part is to code it with a coating that makes the component work how it's meant to work. So it's like a chemical process. And did all the manufacturing engineering rehoused in this new facility in a different state and they couldn't get it to work for like a year. And they finally figured out that there was a mineral content of the water in the different state that was slightly different and undocumented. So the water as part of the process was different and they literally couldn't figure it out because you've got these minute differences in whatever like the localized environment which can all be controlled for it is not that scary on an individual basis but in an aggregate when you think when you realize there's like a hundred billion dollars a year of these parts being produced and it's all kind of crazy like duct tape accidents that it works at all that's kind of like the situation that we're in as a country”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Industrial base is on this House of Cards of 62 year olds that through no fault of their own are retiring, there's no one to take over those businesses and also the knowledge that is used to make those parts is not like in some GitHub or something where they can pass it on to Lockheed and say, hey, someone else can go make this part. It may or may not be written down or recorded in their business. It's mostly in some two or three people's heads that have been making that thing for 10 years and it is complete art. So regardless of capital or talent, the IP or the knowledge of how to make that component is not even fungible or transferable. So you have this situation where it's not just a matter of throwing a billion dollars at the problem and going out scaling some new factories. It's like, no, literally there's two guys in the country that know how to make this turbine blade, this engine component, and they're all retiring. And once they retire, good luck. Now there's six months of reverse engineering just to figure it out. And often this is on like specialized equipment. One of the north of”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you don't have a college degree, you're worthless to society. There's been no new entrance to the manufacturing workforce because it's not sexy and that's not rewarded in the culture. And because we've had no shocks to the system, no one's realized what a big problem it is. So basically that entire band of owner operators at that 20,000, 30,000 small business level, average age of a worker is like 55, average age of an owner-operator who's a small business owner that is actually needed to function in the business is 62. So basically, if you switch back to the first space race or the Cold War, there's a bunch of 30-year-olds that wouldn't start a businesses. And now 30 years later, there are 60, 62. And because we're not rewarding culturally being in manufacturing, all those people were relatively successful. So the sons and daughters got a college degree. So they didn't want to take over the business. So basically we have this problem of the entire defense and space in semiconductor.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's something like 20 to 30,000 small businesses that make up the majority of the defense industrial base. And I think just to frame this before I go into the detail, basically if you're making a fighter jet, you're actually outsourcing most of the assemblies, like a wing or an engine to another company like Pratton Whitney, and then Pratt& Whitney has a network of 2,000 suppliers that give them the components and they might do some engineering. And then so what these companies are actually doing is taking the Lego kits and assembling them and then throwing the assembly up another layer and then Lockheed finally stitches the whole thing together to give an example. So there's about 30,000 or so of these small manufacturers that in aggregate make up the entire defense industrial base, but individually I like small businesses where maybe they have 10 to 20 million in revenue max and there's maybe 15 to 20 employees. And the danger there is because we outsource manufacturing and because we culturally decided”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look scary, and people run for the hills, so none of the stresses in the system have been revealed until now where it's really starting to break down rapidly. And it's a bit like, you know, if you don't maintain your personal health for like 10 years, you might seem fine on the surface, but until you go try and play like a game of touch football or something with your college buddies and you realize that your knee is completely fucked. You know, it's the same type of situation where we think we're fine and it takes 10 years to find out we're not fine. But by that point, the rust is kind of set into the system and we're in a really dangerous strategic position because of that.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talent base in that capacity just simply doesn't exist in the system anymore. Part of the reason is Cost Plus manufacturing just because everyone's been so fat and happy in defense for a long time, but that flows through the supply base. And really, if the government can't really do anything about it, if you're shipping fighter jets late, then does the supply chain really care about it at a base layer? So culturally, basically, the entire industry is tooled up around 50% of our promises we break all the time. And once that sets in and that becomes like the accepted norm, then it's really hard to turn that needle another way, both culturally and systematically. And then over the last 30 years, because we haven't”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the US, really won World War II because of manufacturing and logistics, not because we necessarily had the shiniest missile or whatever. What ended up happening is we had a really good aviation industry. We had a really strong automotive industry and we had a really couple of strong core manufacturing industries that we could very quickly retool to missile production or fighter jet production or something like that. After that, through the financialization of everything in the late 70s and the 80s, basically the corporate incentive outsourced everything to lower cost countries like China where we basically sacrificed robustness for profit and loss optimization. And through that we drove a lot of manufacturing out of the country. And what people don't realize is that when you do that, you don't just lose that base layer manufacturing of the cheap stuff. You lose the skill set and the culture that people know how to manufacture things. When we need to retool it to semiconductor, we need to retool it to defense production or space production.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It takes them several days to figure it out because there's no record of that part. And eventually they find that the guy that made it 20 years ago or whatever is retired. And as the story goes, they find the drawing in his desk drawer from the paperwork that they managed to save when the business got shut down. And that was how we knew how much force to apply to the Bay Door to get it open. And for something as advanced and symbolic as the International Space Station, like that is the ground floor reality of how the supply chain works, which is, yeah, completely bunkers.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“F16 one is this carrier, but basically, if you look at the DoD stats, more than 50% of the F-16s are grounded. And it's mostly because they can't maintain them and it's mostly because they can't get parts. And what ends up happening is they end up cannibalizing other planes for parts, and that makes the problem worse and worse and worse and worse because of this advanced manufacturing supply chain issue, which is not a COVID issue. It's not an inflation issue. It's been going on for years. It's just now that it's coming to the forefront as more and more people are realizing how important defense was and is. And the space station one is hilarious. So there's a, I'm going to get some of the details wrong here. So if anyone from NASA is listening, I apologize. But basically, the hatch at the space station gets jammed. And astronauts want to know how much force they can apply to unjam the hatch because if they apply too much force and they snap it like you know we're screwed so you know they ask NASA what's the spec for this hatch component and”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Below that veneer of product, everything else is a complete disaster. And I think because of the flashy products and you're making like a really incredible fighter jet or drone, people think it's a super advanced under the hood. In reality, it's a bunch of people in garages making components that look like they're out of the fast and the furious too. And it's all duct tape and spit.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Issue an RFQ for some of the parts on the B2, not just to replace the parts, but because no one, you know, the guy that designed it or engineered it retired and they didn't have it documented anywhere. Like there's literally no manual or document of how to make that part. So the government had to go out and say, hey, we need someone to come up and reverse engineer this entire thing. So there's stuff like that that's really scary. And another example is we shipped the Ukrainians what we thought was three years of inventory of Stinger and Javelin missiles, which are shoulder-mounted, really cheap missiles that can take out a tank or something. So for providing that to a human force in Taiwan or the Ukraine, it's exactly what we want to be sending people to deter invasions. We ship them three years worth of inventory. The Ukrainians blew through it in three weeks, and then the AT& CEO basically came out and said, you know, hey, Biden administration, you want more stingers and javelins, but one, it'll take us a year or two to spin our manufacturing. Secondly, we don't know how to make some other components anymore. So basically,”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the defense side is a great example. Everyone sees defense primes coming out with drone programs or advanced fighter jets and stuff and really flashy products and marketing and things while everything works perfectly. Under the hood, once you get below the assembly level, someone making a fighter jet, really what they're doing is outsourcing all of the components, but the wing, the engine, everything to a tiered layer of 10 mini primes, then 203 suppliers, and then literally 10,000 small suppliers dotted across the country that are doing everything from a machine component to, I don't know, the circuit board that is one part of the fire control system or whatever. And that entire layer is basically chaos. The B-2 bomber, which is one of our most strategic assets in terms of a nuclear program, about a year ago, the government had”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advanced manufacturing is an industry term that generally covers the complex and high precision side of all industries, which is usually semiconductor aerospace, defense, basically anything you think of from the Jetsons flying car future is generally bucketed as advanced manufacturing.”
2022-11-17 · a16z Podcast · The Factory of the Future with Chris Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source