YouSaid · the spoken record

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro

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13
first
2026-05-19
most recent
2026-05-19
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Find what you believe in and then go for it. There's a real generational opportunity to build what this country needs for the next hundred years. And we need more founders. We need more builders. And we need more folks in government like the Secretary pushing for change. This isn't a one company, one person is going to solve this problem. We need a partnership across the country and folks that are thinking about getting into this space, building a company, I would say build the conviction in what you believe in and then go all in on it because the country needs you and the partners are here to support you.”

    2026-05-19 · a16z Podcast · Rebuilding The American Shipyard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, I think if I can jump in on that, I mean, commercial first is a major element of our acquisition transformation strategy and the resilience it provides the industrial base. I mean, it's really frustrating how much fragility we encounter within the traditional defense industrial base because we have a sole supplier that's not really that profitable that was a feeder to a design that was bespoke for the defense industry. And all of a sudden, we've really created our own set of vulnerabilities here. If we can prioritize commercial first and producibility as a primary input to the development of a design, that creates all kinds of resilience and benefits for the Department of Defense as well. So that's, I think, key to our success.”

    2026-05-19 · a16z Podcast · Rebuilding The American Shipyard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Vehicle and the next paycheck to support our company's longevity. And maybe it's five years from now, maybe it's 10 years from now, maybe it's 20, maybe it's 30. But eventually we may end up right back where we are. That's why the commercial market is so important. And you see a big focus with the maritime action plan is on the commercial shipping industry within the United States.”

    2026-05-19 · a16z Podcast · Rebuilding The American Shipyard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “To put it bluntly, I mean, poor alpha is a generational project. I mean, we're looking at building one of, if not the largest shipyard in the world, focus on autonomous platforms, focus on the future of the maritime industry, unlocking the commercial market, building larger vessels, cargo containers, bulk carriers, oil tankers, things that enable things like energy dominance, right? It's absolutely critical to have that commercial market. Because at the end of the day, what our goal is to provide the department of war wartime production capacity during peacetime. And if we can't enter the commercial market in a viable and economic manner, then we're just looking to the government for the next contract.”

    2026-05-19 · a16z Podcast · Rebuilding The American Shipyard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Which is really modernized how or take ownership on the actual efficiency and production capacity that they're producing. I think that's a fundamental shift that we want to see industry-wide, which I think levels the playing field for both the new startups that are already practicing this way and bringing our traditional defense contractors who have capability that we need into that construct as well.”

    2026-05-19 · a16z Podcast · Rebuilding The American Shipyard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “That's our fall. That means our design isn't simple enough. We don't have the processes or the work instructions or the training materials or something else. So it's rebuilding and recreating the workforce and changing the culture, what it actually means to work at a shipyard again, making it cool, building for the future, giving people a mission, giving people job security behind that.”

    2026-05-19 · a16z Podcast · Rebuilding The American Shipyard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The workforce is critical, right? The Secretary and I were talking about the workforce earlier. We have to rebuild the workforce to support the maritime industrial base, right? You can't create people with 15 years of experience overnight. So it goes back to the first principles approach design of the ship. Design the ship so you actually don't need 15 years of welding experience to build it in the first place. Then you can actually rebuild and retrain the workforce. I'll steal one of the lines from our head of manufacturing. He says, less like an encyclopedia, more like IKEA. It's like everybody can build furniture. Somebody's building a car for Ford or General Motors or an airplane at Boeing or a rocket ship for SpaceX. And we can't get them highly effective building ships quickly.”

    2026-05-19 · a16z Podcast · Rebuilding The American Shipyard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Marauders using about a 50,000 labor hour on our first ship just for order of magnitude, put it in frame of reference. Apples and orange, just comparison here. I'm going to acknowledge that up front, but a destroyer is seven to nine million. Labor hours. So that's the scale and speed that autonomy unlocks because you can redesign the whole platform and make it much simpler to build. And then you have the capability at the scale that you need to keep as many people as possible out of combat scenarios.”

    2026-05-19 · a16z Podcast · Rebuilding The American Shipyard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “If I was sitting up here telling the Secretary how we're going to build the same ships that we've been building for the last 50 years or the same ships that they're building in China, we're just going to do it better, faster, and cheaper. I mean, he should just politely ask me to leave. You have to bend the economic cost curve. You have to build ships cheaper. You have to build ships faster. The only two levers you have to pull are material costs and labor costs. We're not going to buy steel cheaper than they're buying it in China, so you have to take a first principles design to the ship and just fundamentally use less steel. How do you do that? You build for software autonomy and digitization. Same thing on labor hours. We're not going to acquire a per hour labor rate cheaper than they're paying in China. So let's build ships much faster. For example,”

    2026-05-19 · a16z Podcast · Rebuilding The American Shipyard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So that's one I'll come back to what autonomy enables is, and I'm a huge believer in this, we're unlocking capability that didn't exist before. Warfare will require humans involvement at some point. But I've seen it and you should never send a human if you have the ability to send a robot. You just shouldn't do it. So let's leverage robotics and protect human life where we can. The real unlock to autonomy is speed and scale.”

    2026-05-19 · a16z Podcast · Rebuilding The American Shipyard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Only way to succeed is really to what it take to rebuild an industrial base. For decades, the focus in defense has been on technology, better systems, more advanced capabilities. But increasingly, the constraint isn't innovation, it's production. How fast things can be built, at what cost, and at what scale. That shift is forcing a rethink of everything from manufacturing to procurement. New companies are approaching the problem from first principles. Redesigning systems for autonomy, software, and speed, while the government works to remove barriers and create stronger demand signals. The question is not what to build, but how to build it, and whether the system itself can keep up. Michael Duffy speaks with Dino Mavroukas about rebuilding the defense industrial base for the next generation.”

    2026-05-19 · a16z Podcast · Rebuilding The American Shipyard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “It's really frustrating how much fragility we encounter within the traditional defense industrial base because we have a sole supplier that's not really that profitable that was bespoke for the defense industry. And all of a sudden, we've really created our own set of vulnerabilities here.”

    2026-05-19 · a16z Podcast · Rebuilding The American Shipyard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “There's a real generational opportunity to build what this country needs for the next hundred years. And we need more founders. We need more builders. And we need more folks in government pushing for change.”

    2026-05-19 · a16z Podcast · Rebuilding The American Shipyard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source