Full Anduril R&D Tour: Matt Grimm, Co-Founder & COO

[00:00] All of those functions report into me and I kind of oversee and drive all of that. Kind of the gut so that makes things happen. You make it happen. That's my job. [00:11] It's a very enclosed chamber where you're not getting waves in or out. Here's my favorite, but this one's pretty fun too. Do you feel like you're driving a very expensive forward deployed AI compute node? I do. For a distributed command and control of an AI-enabled battlefield? I feel like I'm about to go save America. That's what I feel. [00:30] You want to play the national anthem or anything here? This is what we have here? Yeah, yeah. This is Venice. But Fury is your favorite? My personal favorite. Why? [00:49] Welcome to Sorcery. Perfect. Macroo. Yes. Thanks for having me here. Where are we? Thanks for having me. We are here at Andrell's headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, in Orange County, [01:00] South of LA. [01:00] We are here in what we call our Building A. This is our Research and Development building. It is a 200,000 square foot building. [01:07] 50 foot clear high ceilings here. [01:09] right across the parking lot from our engineering and design hub. [01:14] So the whole idea with this building [01:16] So we have a machine shop, we have a composites lab, we have a metrology lab, [01:20] We have a development test lab, all of these different environments [01:23] where we can prototype things quickly, test them quickly, find the fractures, find where they break, find what parts of it wear down.

[01:30] and then ultimately use that to drive our iterative R&D process to get products built and shipped faster. [01:35] And what are we standing in front of right now? We are standing in front of, this is our XLUUV. In Australia these are called Ghost Sharks. [01:44] here in America, they're just called the XLUUV. [01:46] This is a fully robotic submarine, so [01:50] No humans on board, no people remote controlling, fully autonomous, so you give it a mission [01:56] You program some waypoints, you program a mission set of what it's supposed to look for, where it's supposed to drop payloads. [02:01] when it's supposed to surface, [02:03] and you send it out on its way and it goes and performs its mission completely autonomously. [02:07] These are designed [02:09] at our office in Sydney, Australia, which I had the pleasure of setting up a couple of years ago, when we first launched this program. [02:16] And now they're currently being manufactured in our Sydney manufacturing facility that just opened. It's about 75,000 square feet. [02:23] and is capable of making dozens of these a year. [02:26] and we'll be expanding production for them to our new facility in Quonset, Rhode Island. [02:30] where we'll be making both our dive LDs, our smaller submarines, and these big guys for the US market. [02:36] Rhode Island is the heart of submarines. [02:38] It is. [02:39] It's great. It is a lot of submarines, a lot of Navy, a lot of water. [02:43] So we have a new facility just in Quonset, kind of on the west side of the bay there. [02:49] So all of these are gorgeous. [02:51] Yeah. [02:52] It's. [02:53] - A big achievement. - Thank you. - No, congrats. - Yes. - But I can't imagine [02:58] Andrel has always been this clean. - No. - So, can you just talk through like,

[03:02] the timeline and what the process was like, and the evolution of Anderil from scrappy startup [03:08] two gorgeous [03:09] ghost shark manufacturer. I still think of us as a scrappy startup, but I appreciate the question. I understand where you're coming from. [03:15] So we're about eight and a half years old now. So we were founded in early 2017. [03:20] and our first office was a 5,000 square foot, I think it was 4,900 something, just under 5,000 square foot. [03:26] garage [03:27] that used to be American Airlines storage facility for lost luggage. [03:31] So if you flew to John Wayne Airport and you lost your bag, [03:34] American Airlines would store it in this garage and just leave it there until someone claimed it or whatever. [03:40] So it had mold on the walls, it had no bathroom, we had to put our own bathroom in. [03:45] It had no air conditioning, it had no ventilation, it was just a storage shed. [03:50] uh... that [03:51] was where we got started. So we started on our first day with 10 employees. [03:55] just the five co-founders of us and our first five employees. [03:59] and just had a couple ideas. There's a famous picture of us brainstorming ideas of what to work on, with just a bunch of ideas on the whiteboard, and that's what led to originally the Sentry Tower, [04:09] for border security deployments and then kind of expanded from there. [04:12] From there, we then kind of expanded within Costa Mesa. We opened our DC office not that long after [04:17] that have been kind of off to the races since then. So we're now just about 7,000 employees [04:22] about 34 or 35 offices around the world, depends how you count a little bit of different buildings on the same campus but [04:27] thereabouts [04:28] and are really off to the races scaling, especially on the production side as we land some of these larger contracts

[04:34] and ramping the full scale production and getting out of just the like early R&D type of phase. [04:39] How do you manage all of this globally? [04:41] I don't sleep a lot. [04:44] And then the it's a pithy point, people kind of bring this up all the time, but like it really comes down to hiring the absolute best people you can find. [04:52] and finding for us that means folks who are [04:54] entrepreneurial, [04:55] folks who are incredibly mission driven, [04:58] folks who are kind of like go-get-em, sort of like can-do type attitudes. [05:02] And the question when we take on big programs like this, and I'll backtrack in a minute to talk about how the program came together. [05:08] The question is never like what can go wrong [05:11] The question is always like, okay, how do we make it go right? And there's just a mindset difference between a like... [05:17] negative worldview of just like [05:19] "Oh, this will never work. Here's 10 reasons why not." To like, "Oh, maybe we could make it work. What would it take?" [05:24] Well, it would take an innovative chief engineer, it would take an innovative operations person, it would take an innovative [05:29] production scaling person, we need a team that looks like this. [05:33] How can we find those folks? [05:34] So finding people who we can build the company around to have that [05:39] sort of positive worldview, very ambitious, [05:41] full of ideas, full of kind of that mission drive. [05:44] That's really what drives Anderol at its core. [05:46] And I know it sounds like some sort of cheesy business school thing. You see like embroidered on a pillow or something, but it's like, [05:52] People really do drive [05:53] the culture. So for us, [05:55] In leadership it's about trying to find those folks, putting them in the right role, giving them kind of the right swim lanes. [06:00] and then letting them run and build their teams and the growth is working.

[06:04] So we have the opportunity to interview all the founders today. So what role does- One of the few days we're all together. So this is what- It's great. It's fantastic. It's a miracle, they would say. But like, what role does each one of you have, especially now at this scale? Yes. [06:20] So, [06:21] You should ask that question to the four individually. - Okay. - 'Cause it'll be phenomenally interesting to see [06:26] where we agree and where we don't. So a few ideas here. So first is that Palmer is our founder and he is the guy who has [06:34] really a lot of the innovative [06:36] drive behind what drives us as a company. So new product ideas, [06:40] new kind of what is in the business is called con ops. [06:43] means like how will they use this product, how does it fit into the current frame of what warfighters are using. [06:49] He's the guy who kind of comes up with a lot of these new ideas and this kind of new idea generation. He's also [06:54] something of our, like, [06:56] wouldn't figureheads the wrong word, I would call them more of our like [06:59] public persona. Like he's out there most on podcasts and media doing interviews, including over the weekend at RNDF, he did a Fox News at [07:06] He's mostly our pretty vocal spokesperson who's out there. [07:10] um [07:11] Trey obviously leads our investor relations and he brings a tremendous amount of expertise there. [07:16] um, [07:17] This doesn't get appreciated in public enough, but he also runs our marketing and our [07:21] our design teams internally, so he has that kind of [07:24] drive behind our partnership with Ohio State or our NASCAR partnership or a lot of the design aesthetic [07:30] that you'll see in our logos and our swag and whatnot that all [07:33] A lot of that comes from Trey.

[07:36] uh... [07:36] Brian is really our, like, I would call him, like, our strategic genius. So he is the one who is looking at [07:43] If Palmer has an idea for a new product, or any of our engineers really have an idea for a new product, [07:48] He's the one who kind of sees the chessboard the best on... [07:51] what the existing programs are, what programs the Navy or the Air Force or what the British Army is going to want or what the Australians are talking about or what the Japanese military is. But he's the one who kind of sees the global chessboard of the different competing programs and and competing companies in the space. There's a lot of companies who work in the defense sector and he sort of sees. [08:10] where Andro plays into that and how we fit and [08:12] He plays that game [08:14] extremely, extremely well. He's obviously our CEO, so ultimately we all report into him [08:19] And he's the big boss and decider at the end of the day when there are conflicts and things we have to resolve. [08:24] uh and then my part um as i said like the joke that i'm the chief janitor [08:28] A lot of the operational problems flow to me. So if that's facilities, if that's HR, if that's IT, information security, [08:35] Physical security, like dealing with security clearances and all that. [08:39] really tricky and nuanced at our scale. [08:41] But more important than all that, our supply chain, our production, our fielding, our sustainment, our maintenance plans, our logistics, like moving [08:48] Things like this around the world is very complicated, very tricky. All of those functions report into me and I kind of oversee and drive all of that. So kind of the guts that makes things happen. [08:58] It is admittedly less interesting and less compelling than like [09:01] How do we sell a program to the British Navy? [09:03] But it nonetheless kind of makes the company run in the background. You make it happen.

[09:08] that's my job. This is an anechoic chamber [09:12] So a number of our products use all sorts of interesting [09:16] radars and different communication standards, so like different antennas, different chips, all of that. [09:21] And then a lot of our products get into electronic warfare. So things like jamming and spoofing. So you could imagine a world like [09:28] sending conflicting guidance signals to an enemy drone so you can convince it to move off target or [09:34] uh, [09:35] doing radio jamming so that you can't communicate with your drones, and that causes all sorts of problems for the enemy drones. [09:42] The question is how you test that. [09:44] because we're, I don't know what airport you flew into, but we're right next to John Wayne, about three miles that way. [09:50] so you [09:50] cannot go out on the roof and just like [09:53] broadcast a big signal that jams communications protocols for obvious reasons. Very illegal. [09:59] So then where do you test that? You test that in big chambers like this where radio waves signals just can't escape. It's like a Faraday gauge. [10:06] Exactly. [10:07] So you can test a bunch of that stuff, and it's a very enclosed chamber where you're not getting waves in or out. [10:13] So you get clean environment for kind of writing that code. So is that your meditation room? That is very, very quiet. It is very quiet. [10:18] And the joke is if you were in there and something bad happened, no one can hear you scream. [10:23] It's the meditation room. [10:25] So in here we have our metrology lab. [10:28] Metrology is a fancy term for very precise measuring of things. [10:33] So when an engineer designs a part and says that we need to have this hole at exactly this location, is it exactly that location or is it slightly off? Like, what is that tolerance with which it's okay to have parts off? If you ever tried to assemble an I like an Ikea dresser and sometimes the holes don't quite line up. Sometimes it's not a big deal. You just like swack it with a hammer and it works. But if you're talking about a big aircraft or a submarine like those those.

[10:55] holes need to line up exactly. [10:57] So in the business that's called tolerance and tolerance stacking. And then you need to measure all of the parts that you're making, certainly in those early phases of R&D, to make sure that the parts you're designing are compliant with the design standards. So here in our metrology lab, [11:12] These guys are using different kind of state-of-the-art scanners. [11:16] where he's scanning the part and then looking at exactly the [11:21] measurements of it and then that turns into an analysis on whether this this part with these grooves is [11:27] is exactly within tolerance of what the engineer specified it to be. [11:31] So they have a [11:32] whole bunch of different kind of techniques for that. They've got some very precise [11:36] measuring arms that can measure with incredible precision. I will get the precision wrong if I don't ask my expert over here. So you know that if this part is designed to a certain spec or certain tolerance that the parts are within it. [11:49] But-- [11:50] It's a fairly standard lab. [11:51] in the grand scheme of things for engineering companies, but nonetheless makes for very cool content. [11:56] Some of these are pretty new, innovative techniques, using weird computer vision and triangulation techniques. This one's a pretty old standard technique, using a precise robot arm. [12:04] They're pretty cool using the camera here with different lasers to measure exactly the part and then turning it into a 3D model. So you can imagine on one hand the engineers over there have a 3D model that they're designing. [12:16] then they send it to get made, it gets made and then it comes back and says, "Okay, did that manufacturing technique work?" [12:22] Like we wanted it to be cast or we wanted it to be 3D printed or we wanted it to be machined out of metal. Was it precise enough? Was it within spec?

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[14:06] visit Turing.com/sourcery, spelt S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. That's Turing.com/sourcery. - She just asked me what all the four founders did, and it was awkward, I couldn't come up with anything for you. We're just gonna, we'll have to, we're gonna dub it in later. - Can I ask you a quick question? - Yeah. - You need to cut this in half. [14:27] Okay. Where should I go? Over there? [14:29] Machine shop that way back to the left. - It's very important. Pencils here, you know. - I told you the nonsense rolls up to me, so. [14:37] This is what we call our dev test area. The dev test area here is an area that is meant to break things. [14:44] It's the blunt version of it. So these guys work on, [14:49] figuring out all sorts of ways to break our products. So whether that's spraying it with salt water, as in the case of our little chamber over here, I don't know how much you've spent time on boats, but salt water eats everything. [15:00] It eats water, it eats cables, it eats metal, it eats plastic, it eats leather, it eats [15:07] eats rubber, eats everything. [15:09] when our products get deployed either on coastal environments or on boats. [15:13] or in the water, in the case of submarines, you obviously need to [15:15] work on a lot of that resiliency, so it's one of the test chambers they use. [15:19] for that, um, [15:22] drop testing [15:23] over voltage, under voltage, like all sorts of different, part of what we use the anechoic chamber for is different kind of [15:30] resiliency to jamming techniques and all of that. [15:33] In our lab in here, we've got [15:35] test ovens, test chambers, so if you wanted to

[15:38] bake a product, freeze a product, low humidity, high humidity, run it through cycles like that. [15:43] This is where you do that. [15:45] We have our vibra... [15:46] vibram over here so if you wanted to [15:49] take our product and then [15:50] Shake it. [15:52] and see if connectors come out, see if the different motion kind of [15:56] causes things to fracture over time. [15:58] vibe tables in here and then in our corner or back over there you can kind of see [16:03] We take a couple steps forward. [16:05] are battery chargers and dischargers. So if you want to cycle the battery over and over and over again, [16:10] get up to high charge, low charge, high charge, low charge at different [16:13] kind of power settings. [16:15] and really kind of drive the batteries to failure, which is obviously important for testing. [16:19] We would do all of that in here. [16:21] So again, in keeping with the philosophy, [16:25] our, um, [16:27] design engineers in the building across the street here. [16:30] And then over here, [16:31] Prototyping. [16:32] testing. [16:32] development, all of that. [16:34] So. [16:35] industry at work. [16:36] - So now that I have you, I figured, [16:39] It'd be best to ask you the hardest question first. [16:43] This is something your whole team actually wanted to address. [16:46] Okay. And it's a little bit... [16:49] - Confrontational. - Okay. [16:50] Is it true that you read every single Slack message? Oh god no. [16:55] - No? - No, no, no, no, no, no. [16:57] No, no, simply way too many of them. Way too many of them. [17:00] No, we have 7,000 employees at this point around the world. So we're in like something like 14 time zones or something. So they're just all day, every day.

[17:08] all the time. So no, I can't read everything all the time. What takes up more time, Slack or X? [17:13] uh slack by a wide margin um but the [17:17] My habit, which is potentially [17:20] ineffective. [17:21] is I sort by unread and then I sort by [17:27] most recent. Okay. So I'll just [17:29] when I'm on a, like, between meetings, walking between buildings, like, have five minutes or something, [17:34] I'll just [17:35] Sort to unread. [17:36] It's not foolproof, and I have to trust a little bit of the system that if people want to get my attention, they'll just send me a direct message. [17:44] But, [17:45] it works enough to get the pulse. [17:46] what's going on. [17:47] So what they're referencing is that they will see me [17:50] chirp in on some random thread and some random channel on like the London channel [17:55] with just a comment on something and people will be like, "How the hell do you see this?" And that's what it is. [18:00] It's just work and timing. Well, you're always in the flow. So you do read everything. [18:04] Kind of, sure. We'll go with that. We'll go with that. Good marketing, I guess. [18:09] Where are we heading into now? Okay, so we are in Anderol's headquarters here in Costa Mesa, and this is what we call [18:16] building A. This is our research and development building here on campus. And we are entering our machine shop here. So I like to say that here in this machine shop we can make one or two of anything. So we've got a pretty broad diversity of tooling and equipment in here. On one side we have the manual shop and you can hear in the background those are some guys welding. [18:34] what looks to be the frame of one of our early menaces over there. [18:38] a bunch of manual mills, manual lathes, manual bandsaws. Think of it as like a custom metal fabrication shop. So if an engineer has an idea,

[18:46] They bring it over here, talk to the fabricators, the fabricators can make [18:49] pretty much anything. So if you want a custom gate for your driveway all the way through [18:54] Command and Control Center for deploying around the world. These guys make one or two of anything. What have you made for yourself? I've made, so the biggest thing I've made, [19:03] is I have tuned the axles on my son's Pinewood Derby car here in this machine shop. Yeah. Yeah. We're big into the Scouts. I'm an Eagle Scout myself. Both my boys are in the Scouts. [19:13] And we've worked on their Pinewood Derby course. What speed are we getting up to now? Well, he got third in his whole pack. Not fast enough. Not fast enough, I know. No, come on. But it's coming soon. So, uh... [19:24] We're going to head down this way. [19:27] and get to see some robots cutting metal. So on that side of the shop is our manual side of the shop. [19:33] Over here is our more robotic side of the shop. [19:35] So we've got our [19:38] water jet over there, we've got our press brake here, we've got our laser cutters here, and a bunch of big CNC's cutting metal that we'll talk about. And again, just to kind of play out the point, the whole idea around here is that this is not a large scale mass manufacturing kind of facility. This is a prototyping one or two of anything kind of facility. So we can even take a look at some of the parts we have here. [20:00] like [20:01] Cutting the shop here, designed in our building next door that we'll see some of a little bit later. Cutting the shop here. [20:08] and then put together welded [20:10] This is probably one, maybe two or three that we'll make here. And then once we get the design right, there are much more cost-effective places in America to make these at large scale. I don't even know what this part is.

[20:20] But, uh... [20:21] like for that early stage prototyping, having the engineers in the building there have an idea, walk over here, get feedback from fabricators, [20:28] build things and have that cycle move very quick. [20:31] ultimately gets us to have products to market faster. And then in the long run, [20:35] even if this machine shop and this kind of operation is pretty expensive on surface. So these guys here are extremely, extremely talented and can make [20:44] you know, genuinely [20:45] one of anything. So we'll see a couple of the parts as we continue on the walk here. Yeah, so we'll make everything from molds for our composite lab that's in the next room over, [20:56] for parts for our XL submarine, [21:00] or parts for Fury molds or some Fury bulkheads we'll make here. So basically big, complicated, tricky parts [21:08] and they'll send it over here and this thing is a absolute massive beast and can cut, you know, you can obviously see the size of the piece of metal we can fit in here. Yeah, it's pretty cool. What are you guys cutting? Oh my god, you did it! Oh my god, yeah. [21:20] Oh, come on. [21:21] Yeah, but you can kind of see and get the vibe. [21:24] I don't know how many of these you've seen on your tours, but they can be pretty cool when they're working at full scale. Because the platform rotates around, it rotates this way, it rotates that way. And then the head itself rotates in every direction. So you can get incredibly precise, incredibly detailed parts coming out of this machine. And again, the same philosophy of just relatively low quantity, [21:43] a relatively high iteration speed, there you go. [21:45] So there's a fun fact with all the scrap. [21:48] - Don't touch it. - That I really enjoy. Don't touch it 'cause it's disgusting. It's really greasy and disgusting. But this is just like scrap metal, scrap aluminum.

[21:57] that you can reforge back down into usable metal. So there are metal recycling firms around here that can just come and they'll buy just like a full bucket of scrap. You kind of see what they're cutting in here if you want to... These are samples of some of the parts that the... [22:12] that the team in here makes. [22:13] So everything from [22:15] jet engine compressor blades and feel free. The edges are sharp. So be careful. [22:20] But, um, [22:21] jet engine compressor blades. [22:23] through [22:25] in a very precise [22:27] helical gears. [22:28] through [22:30] What's probably coolest to prove the point is [22:34] and grab this guy up here. [22:36] So for our Bolt product, which is a [22:39] kind of quadcopter with a small explosive payload on it. The engineers, again in the building right next door, had an idea for the [22:47] the design, send it over here to these guys, and then these guys program the CNC's to cut the metal in exactly the right pattern. You can see the precision of [22:55] the right pattern and where the whole where the mounting plates for the different circuit boards and different wiring harnesses go. [23:01] You can see all of these holes are threaded. So they'll have an idea for iteration one, and then that becomes [23:09] idea for iteration two. Oh wow, yeah. [23:12] And you can see that starting to look and feel a little bit like what a drone actually looks and feels like. [23:17] And then for iteration three, [23:21] You can see the next iteration [23:23] a little bit lighter, a little bit thinner, a little bit different kind of compacted design.

[23:27] Now in the long run, [23:29] This is the wrong way to make these frames. So taking a huge brick of metal and then using a mill to cut all of these things out is very expensive, very wasteful. It takes a long, long, long time. These machines are expensive. [23:42] Our machinists are expensive, they're very talented, so like [23:45] taking that time to cut all these things out is not the most efficient way. What you should be doing is casting these. So you create a mold, you pour metal in, cure it, then you get this out of the end. The problem is that setting up those molds and that tooling for that casting is very time consuming and [24:00] comically expensive. So it takes many, many, many months and many hundreds of thousands of dollars to get that tool in just right. Do you work with RangeView on that? We don't yet. They're one of the vendors we've talked to, but this is exactly what they're trying to fix, to make that problem a lot easier. So what we do is that for those iterative cycles, [24:17] where we're looking at like [24:18] Okay, going from [24:20] this version to this version to this version and then we fly it. And I'm sure you've heard about our testing philosophy, testing all the time and all that. [24:28] They'll go out and they'll fly and they'll say, "Ah, this isn't quite right. This angle's not right. This bracket's not right. I want to tweak this, change that." [24:34] And you can see some of the subtle differences in where the mounting is and the kind of the arms are slightly different positioned. [24:39] through that iterative phase, having the engineers there, the shop here, be able to turn quick turns on these, incredibly valuable. Versus the opposite, which is like, [24:49] I have an idea, I send it to three vendors, I get some quotes, I send them the part, I wait a week or two, I get a part back. Just adds so much latency to that system, but doing it here...

[24:58] The team makes it so much faster. [25:01] So, and then this one is the basically the near final version of what they ended up shipping. Is this ceramic? What is on the outside? It's a powder coating. Powder coating? Yeah, for weather resiliency. [25:10] Yeah, and then the jet engine blades are the really cool part. So thinking of the like a [25:15] because we have a product line called Venom that is basically our own [25:19] Jet engine blades. [25:21] Hold on, see if you want. [25:25] And then I... [25:26] Imagine different pieces coming together [25:28] the air inlet for that engine that kind of fits in the front like that. So you can kind of see the different parts of the engine come together again all cut here. [25:35] Wow. [25:36] FUN. [25:37] I think you have to mark them as sample only so someone doesn't inadvertently put it into a jet engine. How many times do people take them? More than you'd think. The original building here was the Los Angeles Times printing press and distribution facility for their Orange County edition. So I think kind of like their local South County edition down here. On the other side of the building are the rail spur now defunct where they used to roll big rail cars in with all of the printing rolls. Yeah, it's pretty cool. [26:01] And then they would roll those big rolls of paper and ink and all those supplies into this huge building here, where they would do all of the printing of things. And then they would stack the final resulting papers and kind of in those bundles, old-fashioned, into the back of delivery trucks... [26:17] Here you can see kind of this awning that creates a little bit of a loading dock vibe. [26:21] then they would fill those delivery trucks up in their own gas station here on campus, which is pretty dope. Oh wow, that's what that is. Yep.

[26:28] And then they would send the delivery trucks out to all of the corner stores and all the residential deliveries and all that from here. So this was a building was here forever as print kind of died in the early 2000s. [26:41] The building went into kind of redevelopment, and then the global financial crisis hit, so it sat fallow for a little while. [26:47] A developer picked it up and was looking to do a big kind of multi-tenant thing, so like a different company in each of these little corners. [26:53] They had to deal with WeWork at some point to develop part of these buildings. Of course. [26:58] That all sort of fell apart and then we came in and leased the whole building. So that side of the building, that side of the campus rather, is about 450,000 square feet. This building itself is another 200,000. So about 650,000-ish square feet on this whole headquarters campus. [27:17] And then we've got about 2,000, 2,100 employees. [27:20] here, plus support staff like security and catering and janitorial, all of that. So about, you know, in the neighborhood of 2,400-ish people here every day. [27:29] - And you know everyone's location at all times. - Yeah, and everyone's name, of course. - It's incredible. - Yeah, honestly. - It's very impressive. - I wish, I can't. So we'll come out and we'll see a couple of our [27:40] products from our Menace [27:42] product line here. So Menace is a distributed command and control platform, so think of it kind of like [27:48] having smart compute. Sorcery is proudly sponsored by Carta. Carta is transforming the private marketplace, connecting founders, investors and limited partners through software purpose built for private capital. Trusted by more than 65,000 companies in over 160 countries, Carta's platform of software and services lays the groundwork so you can build, invest and scale with confidence.

[28:12] Carta's fund administration platform supports over 9,000 funds and SPVs, representing nearly $185 billion in assets under management, with tools designed to enhance the strategic impact of fund CFOs. For more information, visit carta.com slash sorcery. [28:30] That's C-A-R-T-A dot com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. [28:35] Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor Public just launched something called Generated Assets, and it brings AI into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before. Here's how it works. You type in an idea like AI-powered supply chain companies with positive free cash flow or defense tech companies growing revenue over 25% year over year. Public's AI then dispatches a swarm of agents that scan every single US stock, evaluates them, and instantly builds a custom index around your thesis. What really stands out is how clearly it explains [29:05] why each stock is included. And before you invest, you can even backtest your idea against the S&P 500 so you're making decisions with real context, not just guessing. And beyond generated assets, Public lets you invest in stocks, bonds, options, crypto, all in one place. They'll even give you an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your investments over from another platform. If you want to build a portfolio that actually reflects your thesis, visit public.com slash sorcery. [29:31] Paid for by public investing. Full disclosures in the description. [29:35] kind of like edge compute nodes deployed. So if you want to have AI sensors in the field, you want to have the smartest possible sort of

[29:44] platforms for our soldiers in the field to interact with. [29:47] you need to have distributed compute along these lines. So we have [29:51] very mobile versions of them here on these chassis. And then we have slightly less mobile versions of them [29:57] in that sort of frame. That is what's called our menace. And then there's a variant of all of these that's on a larger platform that's called [30:05] Titan, are we still calling it Titan or we change it to [30:08] Okay, so we'll call it Titan. Yeah, we're partnered with Palantir on the Titan program for bringing their software onto our kind of hardware. [30:15] for this joint program with the Army. [30:18] So here on the Menace platform, [30:21] all sorts of antennas and communication protocols around built-in, [30:26] Big compute nodes in the back you can hear the [30:29] Hear the fans humming there. [30:30] then the whole idea is that our soldiers would be deployed out and then that gives you a [30:35] lattice node and lattice compute [30:38] wherever you are in the world. [30:39] And then this also filters into the [30:42] the broader landscape of having soldier born compute. So like the whole notion of the [30:48] The IVAS program that we acquired from the Microsoft spin out is now called [30:53] I don't know what they called it now, SBMC, Soldier Born something something. I don't know. They change the acronyms every year to keep us on our toes. [31:00] Um, [31:00] But that program was basically like, could you put a, [31:03] lattice node on [31:06] deployed soldiers, so whether that's a [31:08] wrist mounted, head mounted, glasses mounted, kind of AR type system and that's of course Eagle Eye. [31:13] Yeah. So all of this ties together into that distributed ecosystem where

[31:17] Compute. [31:18] comms, security, all forward deployed with the soldiers. [31:22] Come on around, drive us. - Is this your favorite? - This one's fun to drive. [31:25] It's... [31:26] Fury is my favorite, but this one's pretty fun too. Do you feel like you're driving a very expensive forward deployed AI compute node? I do. For a distributed command and control of an AI-enabled battlefield? I feel like I'm about to go save America. That's what I feel. There you go. You want to play the national anthem or anything here? [31:49] Yeah, so to your question, it's really like I prefer, especially in earlier phases, to buy a lot of this capital equipment. [31:56] used off the secondary markets. - Yeah. - 'Cause it's like, what's the chance that our requirements change? What's the chance that we think we need this size or this scale, but then it evolves and we need a different [32:09] different version or a different model. Like it's pretty high. You want to drive, uh, drive off-road a little? You just want to take, you know, is there an off-road track? There's not unfortunately. You can drive right up here, right up through the, through the lobby. [32:22] I got to go to my Palmer interview really fast, so I'll just take it into the lobby. [32:27] Yeah, you can just bring it right around here. Park wherever you want. In the middle of the road? You don't trust me? [32:36] Okay. [32:37] There you go. If you want to come see the [32:40] kind of one of the mini... [32:42] one of the versions of Titan here. [32:44] I'll do... Let's put it in. Oh, flip that one down. There you go.

[32:48] You just did the same drive Secwar Hegseth did a couple days ago. Who did it better? [32:52] I mean, I don't want to... [32:53] Get into political hot water here, but... [32:56] He jumped the curb and drove it into the crowd for the speech. Yeah, it was a whole thing. So. Alright. Were you late for Palmer? Well, this is what we have here. Yeah, yeah, this is Menace. And this is what we have here. This is Menace, yeah. And then this one's Titan. [33:10] Um, [33:11] These are basically the same kind of concept of this distributed kind of compute node. Bigger, more power, more compute, lets you do more interesting things for different missions deployed. [33:23] but harder to move. [33:24] And then, [33:26] kind of in the middle, easier to move. [33:28] medium blend of compute and power. Just different kind of vibes for whatever the, whatever the customer wants. In practice, what they will want is they will want [33:40] one of these at a certain kind of hierarchy of unit and then one of these at a lower level one of those at a lower level all the way down to the soldiers like essentially like order them as a as a set like do you like do you need them all together do people just like them all together no i we like them all together yeah of course [33:57] works better that way to say nothing of being good for business. [34:00] So we're gonna head kind of right over here. - How many times do people make the mistake of just buying one thing at a time? - How it really works is like they'll put out a, [34:07] a requirement or a bid and say like we're looking for a new command and control platform and then we'll go put together a proposal and [34:14] say, "Hey, we've got these different products that we've invented that we think can meet the needs." [34:18] It's more that kind of style than like they're ordering off the menu or something like that.

[34:22] It's a different kind of vibe. [34:24] Okay, but Fury is your favorite? My personal favorite. Why? [34:28] I mean, it's a robot Top Gun. [34:30] How's that not? [34:31] Is that not cool? It is cool. They're all cool. It is very cool. [34:34] Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.