YouSaid · the spoken record

Dr. John W. McCauley

lines on the record: 69
first: 2026-03-24
most recent: 2026-03-24
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

“You drop this into his vehicle last year at the same exercise was driving these Home Depot Chinese battery banks back to the 10K generator and swapping them out the whole time. His XO was constantly doing math on like, okay, when is this thing going to be dead? When do we need to drop it back? We dropped ours in this time, plugged it into the vehicle. And now Powell was not a thought. And now that bandwidth, right? That operational kind of command and control bandwidth was focused on mission objectives, not, hey, where am I going to charge my battery next? So that's really kind of, I think, where if we succeed in 24 months, right? Actually, nobody talks about power because it just works, right? It just works.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I'll bring it full circle to kind of the outcomes focus, right? And again, Charriot, not really liking to talk about our products, but liking to talk about what we enable. And we want to, yeah, we want to kind of blend in as this just infrastructure layer. Kind of similar thing with NextGen C2, right? It's just like everything communicates, right? Everything is shared. There's no silos. You don't need that individual soldier on the ground to be an expert on networks or an expert on radios or an expert on how to configure and dial in this particular radio. It's, you know, I plug something into the network and immediately that sensor, right? All of its data is available to the people who need it. We want to be that kind of same layer for power where it is transparent, right? It's not something that you have to think about. Significantly, you can think about how do I deliver effects, right? How do I be more lethal? How do I be more survivable? How do I hide? How do I use this to operate longer with our resupply? And so that's really where we're focused is, and we've seen some early wins there. We had a brigade commander.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Power my tactical UAS platoon and their battery so that they're not in a hidesight with two generators powering six different types of UAS batteries. Some of them are super slow trickle charge because the cells are smart. Some of them are very fast charged because the cells are dumb. I think a lot of those problems become much more transparent and we can actually start solving harder problems.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tactical microgrid compliant. We should have some type of solid state generator that's tactical microgrid compliant, or we should have something like the infantry squad vehicle heavy, where it's a vehicle that actually is able to put out power, that has tactical microgrid compliant, that allows everyone to know here is the way that you build your interfaces, just like we did with software APIs forever. Here is the way that you serve your power. Here is the way that you have to hook up to so you can give it to us. And that standard should be no more cumbersome to any company than us saying, hey, your software has to have APIs. If we can do that, I think a lot of the problems that soldiers have today go away and they get to ask second order questions like, how light can we make this? What are the other interesting ways that I can employ this? How can I actually power my robotic warfare company? How can I actually...”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll tell you a story. Hopefully it supports the answering question. So I went to, I had an opportunity to go to a Thad battery. I will not say. Even though they are decisively engaged right now. And they were rebuilding, they, these fire soldiers, were rebuilding three KW generators by hand because the adapters were fouled. The guts had basically worn out. And they needed them to make sure they had continuity of operations. And the question that we asked was why are you rebuilding this? 3K is nothing. Go, let's go find some. And they went, we would love that. We would love that flexibility to just go buy a 5K generator and just have it here. And we weren't doing that for them. So we've solved that problem, but 24 months from now, that problem shouldn't exist. Now, it's going to take time to get, you know, everywhere all for the entire army, but we should be able to either have some type of dismounted solid state battery that's tight.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That goes directly to that end user, but can help kind of provide that demand signal to those U.S. companies trying to reshore. The other thing that we think about really in the supply chain space is focusing on those end items or those kind of middle of the value chain items where there's a lot of focus, a lot of discussion right at the national level, at the White House about critical minerals, right, about sales, refining, mining. But where we actually see some of the biggest risks in the supply chain are actually these end items where soldiers are going to Home Depot and buying these Chinese battery banks to fill a gap around power systems that are Wi-Fi connected, right? Systems that could be backdoored, right, from a communications perspective could even be shorted out in terms of their BMS and turned into remotely triggerable IED. And so we see a lot of kind of the supply chain and really trying to drive the supply chain discussion, not just into those inputs, but into those end items. And it all kind of has to work together cohesively.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reading kind of freedom's forge and thinking about how do we kind of reindustrialize, right? And how do we kind of compete in this economic domain against China? And it's not by trying to out China China, right? It's like, what do we do great here, which is capitalism, right incentives? It's the government as a customer, right? Not the government as an investor. And so we kind of really see opportunities to take the demand signal to sell those products into the department and then say, hey, if you're buying, if you're building sales in the US, we will buy those cells. We will buy those first thousand sales to help you get down that initial cost curve because we have a customer, right, who has that highest demand.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And we really kind of see our position as kind of that next level down from the department where we're delivering an end product and end solution. And so we can also kind of, you know, using the demand signal from the department for our products can go past that on to our suppliers and our supply chain as well. And we can say, hey, the department is probably the highest willingness to pay kind of per kilowatt hour for these systems versus kind of consumer commercial type applications. And doing that reshoring is going to take investment, right? Those first hundred, those first thousand, right, are going to be more expensive than the equivalent from China. But what we can do is we can say, hey, we will kind of help you get down that cost curve because we're able to say, hey, we can go and take that and deploy it into kind of the most demanding application that has the most demanding supply chain requirements. And we can kind of act as kind of an off-take agreement, kind of for those companies. And I think a lot about.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Industrial base that there were opportunities that might not have looked like they were available five years ago that will actually be Hugely beneficial for the country moving forward. It's not just a drone thing. It's not just a toy problem thing. It is really this actually solves America's problems, not just the Department of Wars problems.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you're looking at across just IBP industry based policy in the Department of Energy, you're looking at almost $300 million of investment. And then you're also looking at a couple, an additional couple hundred million of investment area that the Department of War is looking at for battery cell production, which turns into battery manufacturing, which turns into upstream rare earth mineral manufacturing productization, metallization, and then making it available so that companies can pull it into their supply chains. So yes, your army is looking at how do we do that. And we are also trying to make sure that the department and industry and the rest of the federal government understand here's the demand signal because we will absolutely consume these things. It allows Americans to get upskilled. It allows factories to be set up for American manufacturing and production and that it tells the American”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the underunderstood components of the army is our organic industrial base. It's 23 depots and arsenals and factories across the United States that were built during World War II and have been running ever since as a strategic reserve for the nation. So the Army builds all the ammunition. We repair radars and combat vehicles. We build, we have them added a manufacturing center of excellence. So that is a strategic reserve that the Army has. So as we think through battery production, there's been two big pushes. So India 26 had investments in battery cells. So that's massive. And then the Undersecretary of War for Industrial Base Policy is also making big investments coupled with the Department of Energy. And how do we onshore manufacturing of battery cells? Super, super exciting.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So maybe zooming out again a little bit, thinking towards the future and power and, you know, the future of warfare. I'd love to talk a little bit, like one of the big risks in power and energy, in particular batteries, is how much of our battery supply chain comes from China. And China is currently beating us on battery production, production costs, and many of the downstream industries like EVs, drones, grid storage, et cetera. So how big is the gap? Is this something that the Army is thinking about? How do we close it? And how do we bring these supply chains closer to the U.S.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing the simple things that nobody cares about except us here in Washington, making sure that our J books are not so specific that we lock ourselves in, making sure that our P and our R forms are talk about the capabilities that we need, not the stuff that we're buying. Because then as new companies come online, as new capabilities become real, that gives us flexibility to try them immediately rather than having to waiting to wait another palm cycle, which was what we did, you know, two or three years ago.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They can make trades on requirements, they can make trades on systems, they can make opportunity cost trades where, hey, maybe we get an 80% solution 30 days from now instead of 100% solution years from now. And then what you'll see in the Army's budget without giving away numbers because that's how I get tackled on the streets is we will continue to be aggressive about BLI consolidation in 27 and program element consolidation, but also”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aggressively. I think last year I talked about a concept called flexible funding or agile funding. We worked with all of the committees and in the 26 budget we were able to get some of our budget line item consolidation. Having those portfolios executive as an arbiter of what their budgets look like also helps because now you have a portfolio of things instead of multiple different efforts and those portfolio executives can make trades within the trade.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we allowed them to reorganize and say this is how it needs to be organized for me to get the data that I need where I need it. And now we're institutionalizing those training or those architectural changes. So I know that it's working in big hairy areas. I think if I were a betting man, that you will see very similar from us on things like autonomy, things like power generation management and storage, things like mission autonomy across air and ground and maritime. So that's, I know that it's working with the things that were really baseline. So I know that it'll work on the things that are much more complex.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not, it's unevenly distributed. So, I will give you one example for how I know that that tick is working. So we started with purpose build a tritable UAS. And now that is something that we are scaling to the Army. We started with sort of a vision Not like Ukraine because we don't fight like Ukraine, but some of the lessons and technology we definitely want and we should scale it. So what you're going to see here in the next couple weeks is the UAS marketplace go live. Live right now. We've got it sort of sequestered off so we can actually try it, get soldier feedback on it. But that is a way that now companies can get their kid out there and then scale those demand purchases. We know that we used tick to fix the network. And really what that means is rip out a lot of the super complex networking stuff that we gave to units.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we spent the next 18 months iterating with them. We expanded a little bit. So I think I've seen Adam at every tick rotation. And then we took it to every combined training center that we have. So that's the real crucible where we make units as a unit actually go fight the fight against a living, breathing, thinking opt for instead of just what we used to do, which is, hey, I worked in a lab, let's spend the next five years building it and then fielding it out. And then hopefully it doesn't combat what we needed to do. We actually made everyone use their technology. Everyone talks about the things that work. The things that came out of TIC that were most important for at least me as an advisor to the chief and the secretary is here are the things that don't work. We should stop doing them. Let's not waste more money. Or here are the companies that are really promising. They're not quite there yet. We can give them rudder guidance or”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“However, that can't be the norm for everything where commercial industry is going to go faster. So we said, what if we saturate these units, give them so much stuff to the point where it's probably going to break them? They're not going to be able to try everything all the time. And then what if we let them tell us what's working and what's not and then organize themselves with the formation and the technology to be the best, most lethal organization they can be? So we started with Second Brigade 801st down at Fort Campbell, Second Brigade 25th in the Pacific and Hawaii, and then 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain, who's going to Europe. We said, you cover the globe. You're probably going to look and feel different rather than just trying to field everyone the same thing everywhere all the time.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a very simple thought from General George and then immediately signed on with Secretary Driscoll. It was, what if we gave commanders flexibility to organize their units and their equipment for their mission? So generally the Army, the Big Green Machine, we have the best capability in the world for the things that are unique to us. Like the things that came out of the Big Five, Patriot, Abrams, Bradley, Blackhawk, Chinook, or Apache, best things in the world bar none.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we can focus on things like energetics and propulsion and things that are super unique to us. That is how we actually thought about next-gen command and control. Go fully commercial where you can. That's how we're thinking about some of our next generation fires capabilities because there's probably not a need for 20 years of government development when we can. See very clearly there's companies who have built better, cheaper, faster missiles, or better, less complex rockets. I get to watch Start SpaceX launches all the time. So those are examples of things that we have done, like the acquisition reform is a thing. It is here, it is working within the Army.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here are the current efforts that we have underway within the labs that solve some of these problems. Here's what we can cut away because commercial industry is probably going to solve that faster than us. I'll give you an example. We did lots of credit to Chris Manning, who was our deputy assistant secretary for research and technology and is now the deputy C2 portfolio executive. He actually put together a gauge that said here are sort of the big areas that we invest science and technology dollars on fires, command and control, energetics, sustainment. And then he also assessed, here are the areas where industry invests their money and if both of those are invested in, that's probably a mismatch. That means we are wasting dollars that you are going to actually solve way faster than we will.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Portfolio acquisition executives and our sort of plus one is the pathway to innovation, pathway to innovative technologies, the pit, the contracting officials work for those portfolio executives. The labs report to those portfolio executives. The requirements generators report to those portfolio acquisitives. So now you really have a portfolio manager who says, here is the current state of what soldiers need in my portfolio. So command and control, protection, fire, sustainment, very big, meaty problems.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I can. And I'm. Proud of where we've been because a year ago, Justin and Layla and I started, we're sitting here talking about what does acquisition reform look like? What does it mean? And now we're here and I can actually tell you, here's what we've done. So the Army had 13 program executive offices across everything. And then PMs under that, we had research and engineering centers that were disconnected. We had contracting officials that didn't work for the PMs or the PEOs. All of that was separate. And they actually lived under different commands. We had Army Futures Command with the Labs, all of the PMs lived under the acquisition and logistics and technology chief in the Pentagon. And then the contracting lived under Army Material Command today. We have six.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm glad you brought up the flow between the industrial base now and the department versus the Cold War, which department was the idea of factory and push stuff out. We are at an interesting time where we're seeing a lot of technology that solves the 80% solution. And then we can hyper focus on what's that 20% edge case because the Arctic is one and we're seeing the exact same things that all of us grew up with, with the super heat, super hot environments as well because the jungle eats batteries just as much. The desert eats batteries. Now we can actually go, okay. The commercial industry has solved this really serious 80% problem. The consumer market is making things smaller, more”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, all of these edge cases were really, really interesting to see soldiers do, but their edge cases. So we saw a lot of the very similar things at JMRC in Germany last year where it wasn't negative 20, it was about 20 degrees. And we saw the same failure. So now we can figure out.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And like one soldier took a space blanket and just wrapped the drone on the battery and it produced enough heat that it actually kept it thermally insulated enough to fly. So that's super, super simple. It doesn't need a whole bunch of other things. DevCom brought some battery heaters, which just slaps onto the cells, draws about 10% of the power from the battery, but keeps it long enough that keeps it warm enough that it will fly.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything breaks at negative 4 JP8 freezes at negative 53. When you are about negative 20 or below, by the time you issue you the battery for your radios from the ConX, they're dead. So one of the lessons, so I had the opportunity to go up to 11th Airborne's JPMRC Alaska Rotation. So 1st Brigade was the training unit. Second brigade was the OP four. And they gave a master class on how do you make the things that you have work? And then we also were able to provide them through DevCom several experimental types of power generation management and storage techniques. A lot of it focused on small batteries and how do you keep those from cold soaking, which is the condition where it gets so cold for so long it actually destroys part of the chemistry of the battery and it doesn't charge properly. How do you prevent them? And soldiers come up with the best solutions.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And again, kind of coming back to we don't actually really like talking about our products, we like talking about what is enable, how can they be more lethal, more survivable, you know, more operationally independent with this capability. And so you can really only learn that by getting to deal with them, seeing the soldier innovation of, hey, what uses do they come up with it? One of the multi-purpose companies threw it onto a robotic vehicle and went and drove around silently beyond the flop while powering all their systems. And we're like, okay, that's a use case we should design for.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The field doing this at a time in transformation contact because the formation structures are changing so rapidly. There's no textbook that you can read on, and especially around power, people really can't describe their power needs, you know, their connectors, their voltage, their frequencies. You kind of have to get out there in the field, give them something, and they say, hey, this doesn't work.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all the above, including just kind of the concepts of operation, how they would transport it, how they would load it onto different platforms. So one of the key things that our system has is every tactical vehicle and combat vehicle in the Army has this NATO port on it, that today they only use basically to jump a truck when its battery dies because someone left the radio on overnight. That is effectively, though, something that ties you right into that vehicle's electrical system. And so we realized, oh, hey, we can actually drop something in there. We can plug into that port. They actually already have that cable. And so with something that we just delivered this one box, we make it super simple to use. We have one switch to operate it. You know, that was kind of the thing that we really learned and iterated on. We dropped it in, okay, well, now they plug it in and now it's going to, now they end up with a dead truck if they charge our system. It's like, okay, well, let's add that bi-directional charging. So we'll charge our system, but then when the truck turns off and they're running loads off the truck, we'll push power back in. So things like that were things that we learned by actually getting out.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All that it has to offer. Yep. Yep, exactly. And so, you know, that's really been a great experience. As I've spent a lot of time, I think Alex could also probably be called T4 deploy an engineer as well. And just embracing that model of, you know, we're going to get out and we're going to learn. We're shipping version 5.2 of our system today as a system that we're actually selling and delivering to Army units right now. And so that's in just a year, right? Going from version one, our first system we actually ever built is still up actually deployed with a unit up in Alaska because it wouldn't let us take it home after the demo. But they also had a lot of really good feedback for us and said, don't take this home. We like it as it is. But if you were to change something, here's what you should change. And a lot of those changes have been, how do we actually make this as drop-in as possible to the doctrine, to the training, right, to the existing equipment, right? Really focused on that interoperability, that ease of use.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've had the opportunity to see Alex out in the field at JRTC out in the mud out there at NTC out in the desert, you know, spending three weeks living out of motels and just getting into the field with the soldiers.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I agree. And this is really the core tenet of when Secretary Hegseth and Secretary Duffy and Secretary Michael for acquisition and sustainment, research engineering, and of course the department, that's really what they're talking about in terms of it's a cliche overused. It's buying runs. It's not, hey, our goal is to field a team. No, our goal is to actually win. And then you field a team that's going to win and you work backwards. So the transforming and contact when we first started it was all about how do we flood the zone for those units, give them all of the technology to solve their problems. And then we will find out what doesn't work. We'll find out what works, but needs maybe some adjustment rather than the two years of writing requirement, the five to seven years of trying to field something, and then going, ooh, I don't think we bought and made the right thing.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I talked about a little bit of just like the paper drills, right? And kind of the process following and the kind of inflexibility to say. Why does this process exist, right? And I think we kind of lost track of that where the process kind of became the outcome versus, you know, the outcome is winning. Like we want to win. And then like, okay, the process exists and we have things around like fairness and we have things around the kind of regulations and stuff so that everyone kind of feels like they have enough of a shot to keep new entrants participating. But there was kind of then this overcorrection where the process became the outcome. And I think what you've seen with the guidance from Secretary Hegseth and Secretary Discolle and General George is really refocusing on the outcome and what that means if you focus on the outcome is, hey, just because this company didn't exist when we started planning this exercise literally for that JRTC exercise, we did not exist when that planning kicked off and it's kind of been a complete transformation in terms of the willingness to accept risk, the willingness to kind of bring in new entrants.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Full circle. And you mentioned this earlier, but you went from founding the company to having a system in the field in six months. How did you achieve that? How would have and how maybe would that have looked differently under the old model before we had people like Alex pushing things forward?”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That actually allows your hybrid system to win on kind of size and cost and weight compared to traditional combustion engine system. And so that improvement's been kind of happening over the past 30 years in the industrial sector. And what we're doing is kind of through good forward deployed engineering and good kind of go to market and building the product in a way that's informed by our experience getting into the bud and dirt with the warfighter. We can kind of take that amazing technology advancement and bring it into the department in a way that's similar to what Andrew did with self-driving car technology and autonomy developed from that industry to what Palantir did in terms of their working with kind of cloud compute and big data processing. Technology invented commercially brought to department. It's been kind of a flip from what we saw in the Cold War, right? Which was GPS, internet really invented in kind of research labs brought into the commercial sector.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. So the time I spent in my kind of first career when I come out of college, outside my time at Andrew was in the electric aircraft industry, electric industry is only possible because of some incredible breakthroughs happening in the technology sector for these core kind of electro-industrial stack components around high voltage batteries, silicon carbide power electronics. It's this almost magical new technology that lets you do all of these things in terms of kind of software controlled power, really high compact, high density. And so there's some incredible breakthroughs there, same breakthroughs that are behind hair and power, right? Same breakthroughs that are behind companies like Impulse Stobes even is these really high power density electronics. And so that was all happening really in the commercial sector, right? Tesla kind of leading the way there. Two of our leading electric aircraft companies are in the Bay Area about 20 miles from Tesla headquarters, right? You know, Joe B and Archer, not in LA, where you might expect them to be. And it's because these incredible breakthroughs happening in the commercial sector.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the software layer that we're adding is instead of expecting our end user level operators to really be PhDs in power. Instead of that, if you just add that software layer, that can say, hey, instead of turning on all three air conditioners at the same time, turn one on, wait three seconds, turn the other on wait three seconds, turn the other on wait three seconds. Very simple, zero operational impact. You've now cut your peak power demand by a factor of three, which means you've cut the size and weight of your system by a factor of three. So some very small improvements with software can have a major impact on mission outcomes.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm glad you brought the coffee maker. So, this is sort of tangent. It's also an education on things that are very hydra versus things that are very low draw because a lot of people don't understand as soon as you plug your coffee maker in or a microwave, you are changing the nature of how much power you're drawing because it is going to spike immediately versus. A lot of our drone batteries are much, much lower draw, but they're longer.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you brought up the wrong voltage, wrong frequency, right? You know, stuff that's frying your hair dryer, right? So a big part of how we're going to fight and how we're fighting now is with allies that don't always share the same power standards. So the other thing our system can do is act as that software-defined power layer to bring all of these different sources together and power all these different outputs. Right now, there's really no smarts running on kind of, there's no like kind of routing happening with power. So someone will go plug in a coffee pot and it'll take down the air defense radar. And so we're doing is applying kind of that smart power layer that's able to kind of manage, that's able to optimize, that's able to forecast and simulate, that's able to convert to the right voltage, the right frequency, kind of through hot software handshakes between systems. And so I think, yeah, people don't realize kind of how much room there is to improve kind of the current power situation, how much encounter insurgency we kind of just got away with some kind of bad habits around this stuff and how much we're really going to have to transform.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so like clean power is something that we used to talk about a lot more. And then we figured out how to put generators in the middle. And separate ourselves, but those were fuel driven. So having clean, consistent power, that's a really important topic.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For their laptops, and it's one of those things where if you've traveled overseas and you plug your phone into a wall after you've figured out which adapter and it doesn't charge quite right, you can tell that it's taken too long or it's getting really hot.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a real, and a lot of people who work in tech and who listen to this podcast sit where in Silicon Valley in the United States, maybe they have a power outage every once in a while, but really don't have to reckon with. What it means to not have kind of reliable, consistent power over their laptops.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you plug into traditional generators and you have a big surge of load, a lot of times that can pass, that can impact the generator's ability to generate your kind of clean sine wave alternating current power. When you're plugging into maybe host nation shore power, right? There's brownouts, blackouts, voltage spikes, all of that is kind of kryptonite too, these command and control systems.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manager, exactly that lets you handle the big surges on the output side without passing those through to your loads, lets you shut your generation off to go into that low signature kind of hiding mode, gives you failover when those power generation assets fail. Gives you high quality power to your C2 equipment. And a lot of that NGC2 equipment”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But at a battalion command post, what we saw was guys idling trucks under camo nets, given the number of carbon monoxide poisoning because they had no way to convert their AC generator power to DC power. We saw the executive officer having to choose who got to plug their laptops in so they wouldn't overload those generation assets. And so what our system does is it kind of drops in the middle and kind of access this converter buffer.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it depends on the use case. And that's kind of the great thing about having this universal product is so we went out to our first transformation and contact exercise back in May of last year. That was six months from first check into the company. So kudos to the Army Transformation Initiative in terms of its ability to bring new companies in to say, hey, we're going to work with this, we're going to bring it in, right? We're not going to make you file six months worth of paperwork. We're not going to say, hey, we already started planning this exercise six months ago. Try again next year. And so we brought it out there. And a lot of it was, hey, let's discover those use cases on the ground. We had a multifunctional reconnaissance company, which is one of the new elements in the Mobile Brigade combat teams. Actually, aerosault in with that M424 system. They were able to run 36 hours without generating any kind of detectable thermal acoustic signature, running their radios, their EW equipment, their drones at a battalion command post, you're looking more at like two or three hours. And this is where we say, hey,”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we actually tend to lead our products with their concepts of employment because that's really what makes our product interesting. And so what our first product is, is M424 system. It's a four kilowatt system, four kilowatt hours of energy storage. But what it does is it can deploy at kind of the squad up to battalion level.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know that I have to generate power. If we don't live in a world where we own everything all the time, therefore, it has to actually produce power in a way that's useful and useful in this context is low thermal output, low acoustic output. So can't be hot, can't be allowed, and it's got to be easy to actually move.”
2026-03-24 · a16z Podcast · The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source