YouSaid · the spoken record

Grant Gregory

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23
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2023-12-22
most recent
2023-12-22
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1
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  1. “There's an asymmetric advantage to having high volume and low cost. And so, in this world of defense, but also just observability, I anticipate there's going to be a number of companies that are able to provide swarms of vessels, both on the surface and also subsurface, that are able to not only protect our shores and our allies, but are able to detect environmental damage, issues in our oceans, and ultimately able to help us probably observe our fisheries and other supply chains much more effectively.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think to start, understand that there's, again, to use these analogies and metaphors, like there's a vast blue space here. And as a result, you need to be really articulate and intentional about what you want to solve. And you're going to be tempted to address plenty of other problems. And the reality is having focus here is going to be paramount to a successful company. And then from there, you're going to earn the ability to operate and expand and do much more. I think another interesting idea that we've seen is that in categories that are really resistant to adopting software, oftentimes hardware is a great Trojan horse where you can sell that the customer base is used to purchasing some form of hardware. And then from there, you're able to layer in software capabilities and use that as the wedge from which you can kind of expand. But I think to carry on the autonomous vessel and vehicle side of things, we're seeing in defense and in many categories.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Of work, they need to be able to see that there's some sort of verifiable evidence that what you're doing will save them money and time. And so as a result, there's just a huge onus on being able to deliver something rapidly in a cost-efficient manner.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Of the best founders we've talked to in these categories have been able to articulate a very clear understanding of both how the broader ecosystem works and then how their company fits into it. On the technical side, it's a double-edged sword because a lot of the tech that we are talking about that can be ported over from other categories like aerospace can be brought over pretty readily, but at the same time, the reality that it is functioning so well is because it is a quite difficult category to build for. And then probably most importantly is once you build it and you understand what you want to do, you still have to sell this to customers. And this is a category that the people in the industry are quite smart, but it's very difficult to convince them to change because most of the stuff that you're trying to sell to them is dealing with mission critical applications. They can't have downtime and they're already dealing with huge backlogs and stresses. And so they oftentimes need to have”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think any industry that has robust history, it's going to be difficult to change. And there's many things that are kind of tied together. There are structural challenges. There's technological ones. And then there's ultimately challenges with adoption and distribution when you're dealing with something in the physical world. Those are often the hardest things to tackle. And that's where friction is really high. And I think for entrepreneurs probably first and foremost the most pressing thing is having a foundational understanding of how the maritime industry works and how your company fits into that picture. Oftentimes this means finding initial beachhead market and understanding how you can enter that market and then expand into a larger prize. And I think very similar to Amazon, you can't boil the whole ocean at once. You need to thread the needle and go from books to the everything store.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Some more of the fringe cases. The goal is to create vessels that can go where people can't. And so whether that's the sea floor and mining precious metals in areas where we can reduce our reliance on other countries for raw imports, or it's patrolling our coast covertly in our alleys and protecting them or just navigating other issues. A lot of this stuff is quite useful. And to date, we've been quite limited based on where people can go. Again, probably the Titan implosion is unfortunately a good example of just the reality that humans can't survive very well under immense pressure in the water.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Autonomy is interesting because there's so many applications and to your point it's been discussed for many years. I think the reality is that there's going to be different waves of autonomy in maritime. There's going to be the actual autonomy for deep water navigation, which frankly is probably less difficult than some of the other problems. Like once you're in a port,”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And create more interesting and efficient route optimizations. And then I think the final thing that's really been interesting is there's companies like ARC, but also Saronic, Androil, with their dive platform that are building new versions of vessels from the ground up with modern day assumptions on how should these vehicles operate in a digital world. And as a result, we're seeing some pretty impressive development on hardware that re-envisions what something on the water should look like. And so now you don't have to account for people on a boat. You can have something that lasts longer and go under the water, can focus on mission planning, et cetera.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “We manually every 100 feet try and measure this where the bottom of the seafloor is. And as a result, it's changing and it's very inaccurate. And this is something that Sonar and other pieces of technology historically haven't been great at solving. And now we're seeing companies with machine vision and other technologies that are fastening this to the bottom of boats and are doing this in a synchronized manner and so that you're able to have a live map of where the seafloor is, how many ships can go down a specific port path, et cetera. So that's one. I think the other way to think about this is you're taking a lot of the raw analog instrumentation. You're digitizing that similar to what Flexport has done with customs and freight forwarding and now financing. And then you're also adding sensors, like I was mentioning, to existing vessels and infrastructure. And you're using all that data to capture.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “There's a lot of change happening, and there's a dearth of problems to be solved. I think the good news is that we're seeing a ton of blue space here in terms of what can be done. And in some ways, we're quite early in this chapter, but in other ways, I mean, many of these companies are progressing quite rapidly and have been adding for a while. And so you're seeing some pretty profound changes, maybe on like the observability front, something that's been really interesting is you have a problem that expands from deep water navigation and autonomy that starts with route optimization, emissions management, but it also ends up in your ports. And so one thing that was pretty mind-blowing is that we're dealing with the majority of our trade in the U.S. is tied to the inland navigable waterways. And you have a mix of ocean water and then sediment that's constantly changing the seafloor. And the current way that we navigate all of this is”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “In a way that scales beyond just their first ARC one boat, but allows them to eventually expand beyond to other product lines. And I think all that together is quite important. We're seeing plenty of additional interesting developments underwater imaging, et cetera. It's just space ultimately had to be done a lot of things in-house and vertically integrated. And we're seeing a similar approach with maritime.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “There's limited sensing capabilities. A lot of the sensors that we use in other categories like radar and LIDAR GPS, they don't really work on the water and they definitely don't work underwater. And then also, you're just dealing with an environment where everything's moving. You have wind, you have waves, you have currents, tides, boats, and then wildlife. And so all of this needs to be hardened. And I think actually a good example of some of the advances you can see on whether it's machine vision, robotics, autonomy, other capabilities, like arc boats has done a great job of encapsulating what the future of maritime looks like. And that from a process and team perspective, Mitch and Ryan delivered the Tesla and SpaceX vision and mission to maritime. They're not just creating consumer boats that are electrified. They're actually building better boats that are more user-friendly, they're more functional, and they're way more appealing to the average consumer. But while they're doing that, they're also creating a manufacturing process that understands that the factory is the product and they're doing that.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “There's a lot. I'd say a great way to delineate it would be there's the processes and understanding how to build quickly and scalably. And then there's the actual technology. And if you're to take an overly simplistic lens to all of this, space in the ocean are both very unforgiving environments. If you have a hole in your rocket, it's going to explode. And if you have a hole in your boat, it's going to sink. And so the status quo here is that there's unrelenting physical forces that are acting adversarily against anything that you're creating and putting into that environment. And so that creates a dynamic where everything that you're building from an engineering perspective has to be both resilient, hardened, and also needs to be incredibly performant in a whole range of scenarios. And then the water also is just like a very difficult environment if you think about it. I mean, electronics and water don't mix well at all.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Encouragingly, we're seeing a wave of startups that are entering more of a maturity stage. Flexport's a great example, and there's plenty of others that have kind of proven out this as a real market and there's real opportunity here to digitize it. And it's difficult, but it's possible. And equally, we're seeing people from a lot of the other American dynamism companies like SpaceX, Tesla, and Android, they're taking their learnings and experiences and bringing them over to the ocean.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “And so I think there's that backdrop, which is important to understand. And then there's also some other larger, I think, deep currents here. One is the International Marine Organization has been establishing new rules and guidance for both emissions, energy usage, and then also broader visibility and data maintenance. And so now ship owners have a real desire and need to figure out how to make their fleet more observable reliant and performant. And then also you're seeing a real rise on the DOD side with renewed interest in the South Pacific region. And again, that's tied to observability, deterrence, resilience.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Past three years, I think, are a good place to start, which is whether it's COVID, supply chain disruptions, or geopolitical conflict and strife. I mean, all of these things are intimately connected to our oceans and global trade. And so as a result, we've seen some pretty significant dislocations in the past number of years. I mean, during COVID, we had the ever given ship blocking the Suez Canal. We had the LA port congestion famously. We've seen a rise in piracy. And then more recently, we had the Titan submarine implosion. And I think they all point to the fact that our supply chains are intimately connected, maritime's at the heart of that. And the way of conducting things analog is not going to work anymore.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “And work on time. And as we've globalized the margin for error has increased substantially and we're starting to see some additional other pressures in the past few years in a number of ways.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I think the one important thing to call out is that maritime is a category that historically has been marked by pretty profound innovation and changes just from a historical perspective. I mean, you started with something like the sailboat, which today is quite de minimis, but at the time was very substantial. You created something like the sextant, the submarine, sonar even, and then something like the shipping container that reduced global costs of transportation for goods by something like 99%. And so maritime in many ways has been the genesis of a lot of pieces of technology that have fundamentally changed the world and give us today. But interestingly, a lot of the current state of the art is very analog. And we're talking about an industry that's still operates largely with pen, paper, and maybe emails and phone calls. And I think part of that is just there's an inherent amount of friction in trying to make logistics work.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Like our maps of Mars or Venus, those are by comparison 50x more detailed. And so it's sounding, especially when you consider how important the ocean is for life. Ryan Peterson Flexport has a great line that the oceans are the circulatory system for the world. But fortunately, I think there's a lot of trends that are pointing in the direction of us actually understanding our oceans much more visibly.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Question. I think on the surface, it seems kind of silly, but when you think about the raw surface area here, it's quite massive. The ocean covers 70 plus percent of the earth. Trade is somewhere north of 55% of global GDP, and over 80% of that by volume is getting transported on the sea. And so you're dealing with something that has, frankly, just substantial scale that we don't have a lot of great line of sight into. If you think about it, when we can look up into the stars, there's plenty of light. If you're looking down into the water, you can only go so far before it fades into black. And so as a result, historically, we've just had very little literal visibility into the ocean. And most of what we actually know about the ocean seafloor today has been gathered from gravity data from satellites. And so it's a useful starting point, but the resulting resolution that we have is only about two square miles, I think. And when you compare that to something.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Advances in AI, hardware, and computer vision present opportunities to transform our cities, ports, and trade networks with autonomous modernized ferries, container ships, and fishing fleets. Robots will help sustainably mine precious materials from the seafloor, map and survey waterways, and monitor the health of our ecosystems. New generations of naval and coast guard vessels, ships, and submarines will set out to protect our supply chains and our shores. Technology is once again returning to maritime.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Everyone, my name is Grant Gregory. I'm an investment partner on the American Dynamism Team, and this is my big idea for 2024. A new age of maritime exploration. Generations ago, our ancestors took to the seas to explore, and yet today we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about our own planet's seabed. A new age of maritime exploration is changing that, and founders are leading the way. Maritime faces similar reliability and engineering challenges as aerospace, and many of the technologies pioneered by the latest space age can be ready applied here too. Meanwhile, the size and importance of the commercial and defense markets provide substantial reward. We're seeing companies like Flexport, Saronic, and Sail Drone, and many others have already started modernizing maritime, and we anticipate the continued geopolitical, supply chain, and climate disruptions will further accelerate the demand for change here.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Very similar to Amazon. You can't boil the whole ocean at once. You need to thread the needle and go from books to the everything store.”

    2023-12-22 · a16z Podcast · 2024 Big Ideas: Developer Influence, Maritime Upgrades, and New Video Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source