Odin and the Future of Maritime Dominance

Mat Vogels (00:13)

Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Pirates Only, a podcast where we interview early stage founders to dive deep in this case, very much pun intended into the ocean to kind of dive not only into the startups that they are building, but the industries that they are building in some feedback that they could give to other founders that are building in some of the similar spaces to them. And today we have

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Two co-founders, John and Amir, co-founders of Odin Dynamics. Thank you so much for being on. We have a rule on this podcast that I try not to A, talk too much and B, give too much away at the beginning. So let's start a little bit with you, Amir, on just what you are building in maybe a couple sentences or less. And then we'll dive into some of the whys behind that.

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Amir (01:00)

Absolutely. Thanks for having us, Matt. I think the best way to describe what we're building is technology for deterrence and how we build deterrence in the ocean as well as larger global context is very germane to the conversation of what's happening in the world right now. But this has been a thought with me for a while that we need to build deterrence through technology and

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building in the ocean is a lot of fun and you get to experience challenges that you wouldn't have in other industries. So yeah, we're really excited about building that. But from a product perspective, we're building autonomous underwater vessels. And I think what I would describe what we're up to is anytime you look at an industry or underwater product,

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you either have to choose whether it's a UUV or a torpedo. ⁓ The unique nature of what we're building is it's both. It's a UUV and a torpedo. It can function like both. And that opens up the mission set what maybe we accomplish with our system to just almost the maximum degree possible. Like any set of missions that we want to accomplish, we can do. However, the most fun thing is that

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Mat Vogels (01:55)

Mm-hmm.

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Amir (02:20)

could be done is you essentially have large scale area denial that you can execute or you can go and cancel area denial by your adversaries. So that's the really fun part. John, feel free to chime in, but that's my high level overview of where we are right now.

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Mat Vogels (02:42)

John's giving the thumbs up. means that you did a good job there. I think you're exactly right. think having both of those pieces together unlocks missions and opportunities, certainly on the defense side, that you otherwise wouldn't be able to accomplish unless those were both merged together. You also kind of hinted on another thing. think building in the ocean, although it's fun.

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Would you, the other obviously big industry right now is space. I have heard many founders say that building in the ocean is harder than building in space. Would you agree with that to an extent or how would you compare the two?

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Amir (03:15)

I would actually agree with that very much. And this is when I speak with like my SpaceX friends, this is one thing I say to them to excite about what we're up to. Here's a funny bit about this. I started my career with Hyperloop and when we're building Hyperloop, one of the hardest challenges was how to deal with what we called at the time, a pressure sandwich. So you have this tube, which is at a very low pressure on the ambient outside, you have ambient pressure.

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And in the pot, you also have ambient pressure. But the nature of the fluids is such that if there is a leak path, they will find it. Like if there's any leak path through the air and you have pressure difference, it will find it. And that problem gets compounded when you're dealing with water, which is a much more viscous fluid. And when you're looking at a fluid column, because the density of air versus the density of water is really different, and you have such pressure,

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So fluid will find its way if there's any leak path, any weak structure that you may have, it will buckle and will find its path. So building an ocean exposes you to a lot more challenges. I don't want to sound very, let's say, I don't want to be sacrilegious, but landing a rocket is a lot of fun. However,

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building something that you can recover through a submarine, dock at 6,000 meters without any clear indication or lock through a torpedo tube is an extremely hard prospect. ⁓ I don't want to, again, rank the two in terms of difficulty, but if you're looking for challenges to solve in life, that's a pretty hard one. And similarly, things get really

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Mat Vogels (04:50)

easy.

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Amir (05:04)

difficult in terms of autonomy as well. So in the real world, like in the air, when you're building UAS or you're building UGVs, or even USVs, you can see, you can touch field, you have a camera vision system, and you have models that are very good at classifying what you're seeing. And it's very easy to look at things. But when you get underwater, the turbidity of the water, the marine life, the seaweed, and so many different phenomenas coming to play.

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that the edge cases are way too broad for you to be able to effectively take whatever works above the water into underwater. So the problem gets compiled in a lot of ways. So a lot of these challenges, and John has a lot of experience of doing this already, but for me, coming from a background where I've done surface stuff, but I've never built underwater stuff outside of, let's say, harbigate sands that we would play around with in the ocean.

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I haven't done anything large scale that could autonomously guide itself from waypoint to waypoint or utilize INS and dead reckoning to navigate precisely in a defense context and execute a mission or do automatic target recognition. So a of those challenges become, a lot of hard problems becomes extra hard if you have to do them underwater because you have no communication from the outside world beyond just a very few things.

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And acoustics are good to a certain degree, but you can't rely on them all the time. So yeah, there's a whole host of things. If anybody wants to solve or get into it, the word is, you're oyster in a way.

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Mat Vogels (06:43)

I love that. think we hear a lot from folks that aren't building in the ocean or even in space. They're always surprised to hear when I mentioned that, like a party or something where I'm like, building in the ocean is harder than building in space. But you're exactly right. I think that they're the variables that go into it, the communication aspect, especially if you're going deep, the pressure, all these things. And again, it's hard to build in space too. We're not saying it's easy to build in space. But...

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from a problem solving perspective, there's some exciting things and problems to solve when you're building under the ocean. Before we dive into maybe more, because we can go down a whole rabbit hole and we will on building in the ocean and the market polls and things that we're seeing there. Can we talk a little bit about your backgrounds and why you chose this avenue or this domain even in building Odin?

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Amir (07:29)

Yeah, I can quickly give a very quick background. like I said, I started my career with Hyperloop, built a lot of really cool system, leading induction motors, structures, moved on from there to a UAV company, built out UAV systems. So we deployed globally, Asia, United States, Europe, and I was working on one of the latest aircraft. We were doing medical drone deliveries and I was starting to scale production.

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Then I got the call at Tesla, went there, worked on a lot of different things, contributed to powertrains, 4680 cells, dojo, and got to work on two Tesla Starlink stuff, Starship, and moved on from there to ARC boats, where we were building water sports boat. That was also lot of fun. We launched ARC One, ARC Sports, and one of the highest-end battery packs.

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on the water. then my last job before starting building was at Supernal. So I was in the organization for the battery power train. And that was a lot of fun, was working at a very large organization with essentially an attached big automotive component. So we're building factories in Fremont and Korea to build aircraft parts in production and launching three programs in parallel.

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That was also going to be developed, but my genesis of like this part of doing things in defense has been in my mind for a long period of time. tried doing, when I was even at Tesla in late 2022, I was thinking about what do we need to do in terms of building deterrence at a global level? And some of the events in Ukraine kind of expanded my ideas and thoughts about

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what is possible if you have a great maritime deterrent solution. If you have a solution that is not limited by range or endurance or payload capability, what are the missions that it would open up to? So going to AHRQ, the thought in the back of my mind was, we're also going to try to do some defense work. We tried to get into DIU at some point, and then through

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Super and all we're also trying to do building large US systems for contested logistics as such. But the pull of like trying to do something in the ocean was always in the back of my mind. So in mid 2024, I quit my job and I went to like spend some time in like different naval bases to try and learn and just schedule meetings with whoever I could, you whoever would give me the time of the day on a cold email, like, you know, admirals, war fighters, sailors, special forces.

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see people just to try and tell them like, this is my background. I'm trying to build something in maritime. What is the top three problems in your mind that you think are worth solving? And where does everybody see the evolution of warfare from now to 10 years and 50 years going to be like, especially in maritime, but also in a broader sense, where do the people see problems that we were just not equipped to solve?

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And there was a lot of recurring themes in that. Like one, what I learned very immediately is like people at different levels in Department of War or used to be Department of Defense don't really talk to each other. So if you talk to somebody at a four-star level and somebody who is just enlisted, their sense of what their problems are or where things are going to evolve is very different. And the second thing, recurring thing that I learned is

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Everybody complains about that a lot major part of our arsenal is becoming quite archaic. Even though they some of the state of the art advanced systems, they were designed long, long time ago. So the advancement in the current technology, they're not able to leverage that. So like a camera module that goes into an IR module that goes into an aircraft that was designed in the eighties and the nineties, today's technology has evolved.

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way past. It's not even linear. So exponential growth has happened in the last few decades. So the current systems that are being installed into the aircraft and the missile systems, they cannot leverage the current technology because the process of getting something approved and put into and then the cost of plus contract, it's just, you know, quite extensive and bureaucratic. So the idea that I leaned heavily into is let's build something that's extremely modular.

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and it's extremely highly manufacturable. So when the point comes to make something great and then we need to continuously improve it. Like for example, know, one of the things we see at Tesla is every car gets updated every, like the model of the car that's in production gets updated every week. So if you buy something today and you buy something in a week, there's going to be marginal improvements. If you wait a month, there's going to be like a bulk improvements. And if you wait a year,

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it's a whole lot of difference. So when a new model comes out and you hear people say in Twitter, like, there are panel gaps and this and that. So it is quite true, actually. But over a period of time, everything gets smoothed out and then you have excellent improvements. And those are just the output-facing improvement. Internally, we improve a lot on the manufacturing and the tooling, and we reduce the way we manufacture things and the manufacturing cost.

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of every system. so I wanted to replicate similar model in defense where we take the continuous hardware and software improvement model where we continually build, improve, we make uploading or giving that to the customer frictionless. And I think that's what some of the things that I got onto. And as someone who is from the commercial side, I had zero exposure to what the defense.

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acquisition system looks like. So I started meeting people. got connected with Ben Chitley, who's the CSR Havoc AI. And I told him about my idea. And he said, you're doing anything underwater, there's one person that the Navy trusts that you need to talk to. And he connected me with John. I told him about my idea. And he said, told me, yeah, you need to pack up and go home because what you're describing is not going to work. It's absolutely.

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Mat Vogels (13:48)

Uh-huh. ⁓

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Amir (13:49)

You know, it's a fool's errand.

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And then we got to talking and I explained some more to him and I explained my background that I've been building batteries and built batteries that can do two kilo amps of current and 65 C to 100 C discharge. And we got to talking on a specific car model, which is the Model S Plaid that John is a huge fan of that I had and in getting to production.

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Mat Vogels (14:15)

huh.

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Amir (14:18)

And I told John that, oh yeah, model is power train, that's fun. Actually in pictures, I was like, that's my favorite kind of work. He's like, you were involved with that? I was like, yeah. I was like, okay, now I actually believe that you have a shot of doing this. And then we kind of exchanged notes on what the vision is. And that's how we got started. And John, as soon as he got off the Navy, joined the company and we kicked it off. But John, feel free to share your side of the story on that front.

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Jon (14:48)

Yeah, for sure. Thanks, Amir. So yeah, Ben made the introductions and I hopped on a call with Amir and it was exactly my reaction. It like, just do anything but this. Like really, this is a terrible idea.

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Mat Vogels (14:59)

Yeah, don't do this.

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Jon (15:01)

And I remember putting my, I still remember putting my phone in the little phone box outside the office at PMS 408 where I was a PM and walking back into my office and I was like, man, I feel so bad. He's going to waste so much of his life trying to do this because I know he doesn't believe me. So I was like, all right, well, I should like really reach out and try to help him find something else to do with his life.

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Mat Vogels (15:18)

Yeah, because at the time, you said you just wanted

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to build in the ocean. at least you could, John, you could have been like, no, maybe try this way or go this direction.

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Jon (15:25)

Right. Right. And yeah, over the course of a couple of conversations, it dawned on me. And the reason I was telling him like, this is insane, don't do it wasn't because it wasn't a good idea. was just insanely hard. Right. And so I'd seen a lot of people try. I've seen a lot of progress over the years. I was a PM who owned most of the UVs the Navy's had. And so my thought was like, just, you know, spare the suffering. It's a very, very hard problem. And like only exquisite like teams that are

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like really capable for this are able to do it. And, you know, fortunately for me, about two years before I met him, a friend of mine was leasing a Tesla Plaid and he was like, hey, take it for a spin, John. And I was like, no way, man, I'm not going to touch your car. And he's like, it's leased. I was like, give me your keys. So I took the Plaid out and, you know, I won't give you the details to avoid incriminating myself about like what speeds we had and how fast we were going. But yeah, speed limit all the way. And I remember getting done with that.

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Mat Vogels (16:13)

You're driving the speed limit. Yeah.

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Jon (16:18)

And I was like, this is the most well engineered, exquisite thing. And look, I'm an engineer. Like my undergrad and my master's was mechanical engineering. Like this is right in my lane. was like, this is the best built thing I've ever touched. It was so impressed with it. And so when Amir was talking, he's like, yeah, I helped build the plaid. I was like, okay, what part? And he's like, batteries, power system in the powertrain. I was like, my gosh, you could do this. And it was that moment that like, you know, it's risky, it's hard. The government is fickle, but like there's a chance we could.

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Mat Vogels (16:40)

huh.

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Jon (16:47)

actually accomplish what we're out for, which is a complete moonshot that's never been done before. And, you know, in hindsight, I'm exceptionally glad I did it because, and this would be my advice to anybody who's retiring. And I know this is probably not like what we're here for, but I'll just say like anybody who's out there thinking about joining the private sector after retirement in the Navy, do not play your first gig safe. Take a big risk swing for the fences because you'll never have to wonder. And, you know, at the end of it, there's always going to be those beady jobs that are there for you right now from your network of friends.

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Mat Vogels (17:08)

Yeah.

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Jon (17:15)

So like just take a big risk, try to do something crazy your first time out. And like if you do it, then it's life changing and either way you'll have an amazing opportunity and a lot of fun doing it. so, you know, fortunately Amir is an amazing guy. He's super fun as well as brilliant enough to actually pull this off, I think. And swing it for the fences.

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Mat Vogels (17:32)

I love it. Yeah, was gonna say, great, sparks are flying. John, want to stick with you just for the next kind of question here, because it kind of goes into in what you are building. I remember looking, you spent, was it 20 or 25 plus years with the Navy? Is that right? Well, obviously, very much appreciate your service, but you may be better than anybody in the private sector working on this, have the first hand experience. And you also mentioned

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Amir (17:33)

Thanks, John.

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Jon (17:49)

Yeah, 24 and a half.

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Mat Vogels (17:59)

seeing all of the other companies that maybe had tried and failed in this piece. Could you talk a little bit more on the problem set of what it was or what it is that Odin is now solving for, for the folks that maybe don't understand, what are some of those problems that you were seeing in the Navy where technology was needed in order to solve? What are some of the missions or things like that?

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Jon (18:21)

Yeah, for sure. Appreciate you asking that. Let me start off by saying the people who are on contract with the Navy right now on the industry side are amazing. Right. They are delivering solutions today that are incredible. And look, I work side by side with them. So, you know, I won't name names or companies, but like for folks who are familiar with what the Navy's buying right now, it's an incredible capability set. Right. So it's designed for what it's being used for in many ways. And it's taken years to do and they're incredible companies. So, you know,

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I try to cooperate where I can compete where we must. So like, have a lot of respect for everybody in the industry with that as a framing though. There's a couple of things that are unsolved and I mentioned it before, but water's a thousand times more dense than air, which means that resistance and range are the problem to be solved on literally every platform that goes underwater. And so that was sort of the nature of my reluctance at first was, Hey, if you're either going to go fast or far, you cannot use existing tech.

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Like commercial battery solutions. so, you know, here's generally how the industry works. there's a, a fixed set that the market's not that big yet. So there's a fixed set of people making components. Integrators buy these components, which are largely the same. They assemble them and then they do some uniqueness around software and autonomy. But everybody kind of has the same range and top end because the battery supply that sort of gets to this is, is common across them. And so the biggest problem that we're trying.

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to tackle is like just getting to the problem. So as an example of what we were dealing with, you have to drive a boat with people in it into a minefield to get the vehicles to do their mission. Once that mission is done, you have to drive that boat back into the minefield to put remotely controlled vehicles, humans on keyboards back in the water to complete the mission. So range is absolutely the problem to be solved, which is, you know, sort of the thesis behind what Amir and I are trying to tackle.

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And it requires somebody with like first principles, energy, battery and power management skills, which really doesn't exist in maritime, which is why, you know, I was personally convicted around the bet we're taking here at Odin. The next problem is that you're literally blind underwater. And so, you know, I was a Navy diver, did a whole bunch of missions and all sorts of conditions. And generally speaking, what you can expect from autonomy is what the best human can do. And I can remember more than a few times where I was.

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not able to see anything, not sure what direction I was facing or where I even had to start going in order to get to the problem I was supposed to work on underwater. It's really, really hard. So these machines underwater, they face the same problem. So just making sense of your environment. And literally, we're so new underwater that it's like if you can make it to where you're supposed to be with enough energy to do your mission, you're like in the top 1 % right now. Because back in the day, the whole the way that the Navy started with

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Mat Vogels (21:02)

Wow.

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Jon (21:06)

all of this underwater vehicles 17 years ago now was they literally put out a challenge to industry to run a mission. And of all the companies that showed up, only one could consistently return. Like just literally like go out, do the lap, find the thing and come back. And so the problems underwater are still so hard. And so that just puts some specifics on like the earlier conversation and Amir worked at SpaceX for while. He didn't mention it, but he knows how hard it is to build in space because he's been doing it.

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You know, in space, have constellations that are collecting so much information, piping down data. Commercial wifi is coming from outer space right now. The cost of delivering something into space is soon going to be on par with a FedEx delivery, right? Like the costs are dropping so much and we're making so much progress. And in maritime underwater, you're in the top 1%. If you can literally go, I'm going to use a representative number here, a hundred kilometers, find something around the size of a home.

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underwater and return when you're done. like that is a very hard mission for anyone to do right now. So just compare that to outer space and then look at the investment we've made and like it's amazing how much work is left to be done. So so your question was what are the challenges right endurance to get there sense making to understand where you're at and then the autonomy to do something useful underwater like just the very basic things are so hard that the best analogy I could use is probably like golf.

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Mat Vogels (22:09)

Wow.

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Yeah.

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Jon (22:33)

Right. Like you just need to hit a tee shot, make an approach shot and then sink a putt. It's not that hard. Right. Yeah. My cousin's like a golf coach. Like nobody can do it. Right. And so like maritime is like that. Like, it's so easy. You just make every hole and the number of strokes prescribed in your scratch golfer. Like, why can't everybody do it? Because it's like really, really hard.

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Mat Vogels (22:37)

Yep.

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Mm-hmm.

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Yeah, that's a great background. And I think that people really don't understand, especially the communication aspect or just the autonomy aspect. I love the analogy of bringing in almost like a human vision piece, because I was going to ask, what distances or where does it start to break up? And it turns out it's like within feet. it's very, very cool. Yeah, exactly right. As far as you can see underwater, which is the which is surprisingly not that far. Maybe.

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On your side, Amir, how much of on your background? So I love that you guys have this kind of dynamic where John, on your side, you have the 25 years in the Navy and seeing these problems firsthand. And then Amir, on your side, you have the first principle playbook from the SpaceX and the Tesla on building things from first principles and then also building them at scale. We've interviewed a lot of folks that have had Elon Musk companies and the number one thing that they keep bringing up.

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is this fact that they start from first principles, but the first principle is not just how to make the one thing, but to make that one thing a thousand times. Can we dive maybe a little bit on some of the learnings that you were bringing in to, from those two experiences specifically, but from Arc as well, or any of them, but how are those things applying into what you're doing right now?

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Amir (24:09)

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that's some of the things that you dial in as you're building stuff in general. And as you keep building, you'll learn the nuances. I think there's a couple of ways to look at it. First, when we think of first principles, is generally how it's very easy for people to understand. So there's a very famous story of Elon.

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going to, you know, looking at the Merlin vacuum engine and comparing it to like, you know, what the model has cost and like they're similar in the amount of material being used. So why does one cost so much versus, you know, the other, should be roughly the same. So this is, that's the basis of where we start, when we start to think about what something should cost to make. So if you essentially boil down fundamentally, like how much metal is needed to make something.

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You have different quantities of stuff you need to make something, like with your metal, plastic. And you bring down what are the raw material costs, how much total would look like. And then from there, you look at even down to like individual parts. Like if the raw aluminum cost of something is like $200, and it takes you $2,000 to manufacture something, that's your idiot index, meaning

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you don't want that idiot index to be too high. Like you should spend the least amount of effort to like rearrange those atoms to look into the final part that you're going to be put into. And other things from the factor like, know, building the process in a much more clean way. So for example, one of the things John and I both actually hop upon that we have built into the company is like, no part is the best part.

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If something doesn't need to exist, should not. And if something is only adding very minimal amount of value, let's figure out a way to delete it. Like we should not have stuff that doesn't add value. also simplifying requirements so that we have a clean cut requirement and very dustable requirements. Because in a lot of ways, like when you look at government programs in the past, if you're building an aircraft, the force that's at superlative, the amount of requirements

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that you have to use a whole software to manage requirements and the interdependencies and everything. We built a software that does that in-house because it's so simple and we have kept it simple. We don't want to make things too complex. it starts from there. You always have requirements that are testable. If there are requirements that are not testable, there are suggestions. There are not requirements. So you define clear requirements.

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And then you make sure you keep simplicity as your guiding principle. Don't add parts that don't need to be there. And make things with low idiot index. how you scale something is the fallacy a lot of people have is that you build something and then you'll figure out how to scale it. That actually leads to a lot more problem. So when you're designing something, you have to start with the idea that

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How am I going to make like 10,000 of this? How am going to make a million of this? So for example, in Tesla, if you're building something that goes into inside an actual product, it could be something else like a plastic enclosure that encloses a PCB. You have to always think about, OK, how am going to make a million of this? And how do I need to prepare myself? And there's a whole process around it. But generally speaking, you figure out the demand. You get your tag time.

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what is needed, you figure out how many stations it's going to go through, and what's the equipment availability that I need to supplant for that. So you build that whole timeline, but on a very higher level, you always think about what's the process around it. And when you're designing and building something, you are also validating your manufacturing tooling and your process in the early stages of build.

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the complexity and the difficulty of making, of scaling something from 10 to 100 and 100 to 1000, it's like exponentially high. And if you're not prepared for it from the beginning, it becomes a very hard charge. I'll give you a very specific example, right? From our product, and John has told me this a way back, but I won't give you a specific number, but a huge portion of the...

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existing like UUVs in the market, a huge portion of that cost, close to about half of that comes from like the itself, because the way hull is manufactured, you you take a large slate and CNC and you go in and you ream and you are applying like reams and bars and stiffness in the right place. It's very expensive process, right? And you cannot produce them at a high rate because machining is not a race.

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process, it takes time to go in and then you have to quality test. Whereas what we've done is we're like, you know what, what else can we do? There's hydro-forming, there's drop hemiforge, there's extrusion. So we combine process so that we can get to a point where we can produce a hull every 20 minutes. So that's the level you're opting in. Yeah, there's a small amount of, in the larger context, there's a small amount of like...

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CapEx that you have to invest upfront to get all the tooling and everything necessary. But the long-term vision is if we need to build a lot of these systems and if we need to, let's say in a Indo-Pacon conflict, if we need to flood a certain area to protect the other islands and there are 10,000 of them, you would need to deploy a lot more UUVs and torpedo systems. And that's where this comes really into play.

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If the Navy comes in and says, want 100,000 UVs, how fast can you build them? Then you might lose out of program if you're not prepared for it.

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Mat Vogels (29:57)

Yeah. The other thing I want to echo on that, cause we see this quite a bit on, uh, on the VC side, certainly where it's almost too late. And I think the industry itself and folks are starting to think about this earlier as well and VC certainly, but for a long time, you'd have these founders that would make these beautiful prototypes and they'd make one and it great in it and outperformed maybe what existed today and everything was good, but then it falls apart so quickly when you have to scale it.

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even to 10, let alone 100 or 1000 and then tens of thousands of these things. I think certainly a trademark from SpaceX and Tesla is this thought that if you can't build a thousand of them or 10,000 of them, it doesn't matter if you can build one of them that is the best in the world at that particular thing. It's not going to make a difference. one of them, whether it's a mistake or not, I'm not sure. You'd probably be able to say better than I is

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Some founders make the mistake of thinking, well, but we'll figure that out though. let's just make the one first. We'll figure out the scale stuff later. that, is that def, is that a wrong thing for these founders? Especially the ones that are listening right now that are thinking of building something like this.

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Amir (31:08)

Yeah, that is the wrong thing. But here's a quick concept about that. So when you think in terms of like, let's say, you you have your time, your energy and your capital, those are like your three levers you can pull on. One of the things we are taught at Tesla is spend the least amount of resources in validating ideas.

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Mat Vogels (31:12)

Ha

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Amir (31:30)

Like if you need to validate an idea, we don't, you know, go out and do something. We'll take scrap 80-20 or something. I still remember the project when we were doing the, you know, the steering that we got on for the plaid, which was quite controversial. But there was, there was like a project where we needed to validate the number of hours and its life.

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And people were thinking about all these exquisite novel ideas. And we asked just from Intel, no, no, no, all that fancy stuff will come into play later. Let's just build something so that we can use Actuate and Motor to just do this for a million hours and see, apply the same amount of stress to calculate a million hours of usage and how quickly we can get to that stage.

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And similarly, another very big example I will give you is like, I needed to calculate at one point what is the coefficient of friction is between two layers of the jelly roll of a cell, right? And if you think about it, like when I first sat down, I just thought about like, okay, I need to do this, I need to do that, and I need like this very specific and precise measurement, because those are flammable and they're like, know, corrosive chemicals.

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you can't do that experiment outside in the NBA there. You have to take it inside actual a chamber to do that experiment. So I was like, okay, what do I need to do? And I built this like very, very, even by my standards, a very simple setup that would actually, you know, demonstrate that. And I showed it to my manager and his manager Drew.

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and Elon and everybody is in the meeting and I showed them the concept and I got yelled at like, I cannot tell you like, were like, no, make it even more simple. And I was like, okay, got it, got it. So you know what I literally did? I built like this opening mechanism sliding and I put my iPhone, I taped it on it so that it gives me the sliding angle. Cause that's what you're looking for. It's like at what angle it starts to slide off and that's the coefficient of friction.

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Mat Vogels (33:28)

Mm-hmm.

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Amir (33:45)

And then you apply electrolyte on it, and then you calculate with the electrolyte, without the electrolyte, what is the friction? So we're calculating what kind of like separator we need to put between different electrodes to scale the 4680. And what I was thinking of building would have taken us a week, but what I built eventually took me a couple of hours. So like that's the level of like operation is like the...

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The bottom line is you should spend the least amount of resources to validate idea. But once you have validated something beyond a shred of doubt that it works, then you bring the entire might of the company to bring that idea to production.

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Mat Vogels (34:25)

Yeah, the hearing you say that, it's amazing to me, like just how many incredible companies are gonna be built outside of like the SpaceX's and Tesla's of the world, because what you just gave was an example of one problem or one thing that you needed to solve that, you know, saved you a week of time. But it's something that John mentioned earlier, there's gonna be a hundred or thousands of those individual decisions that you're gonna have to make in the very early stages. And that just obviously.

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compounds across all of that. So it's incredibly exciting to see when founders are leaving some of these great companies and taking those learnings with them. And then obviously teaching it then to their own teams and scaling them and growing there. And it's just going to be this massive set of growth of these incredible companies, which is a consumer or a benefactor of all these things is always very, very exciting. I want to share a little bit more about the market.

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whole side of this because a lot of the folks listening are founders. But if you're not a founder or maybe aren't as aware of why building in the ocean is so important right now, can we talk a little bit about that? don't know, John, if you're whichever of you guys wants to wants to take this one, but from the global conflict side to the industry side, the defense, any of these you mentioned earlier, you know, perhaps

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the lack of inventory or technology or investment we've made in the ocean and how we're kind of paying that bill now today. Could we take it even more granular or higher level? What are some of the reasons why now is the time to build in defense in maritime, in the ocean, from geopolitical to technology, any way you want to take it?

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Amir (36:04)

I think this is John's question, John, feel free to go into it. I'll add some comments in the end.

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Mat Vogels (36:09)

Hahaha!

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Jon (36:10)

I think for the first time we're seeing the technology to actually be able to do this effectively, right? And if you look at the national imperative around why this is so critical, either on the defense or the industry side, I mean, one need only look at what's happening recently with shipping lanes and freedom of access into the Navy. And that's an undersea problem. And, you know, what most people don't realize is that undersea, you're basically invisible still. And so

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You know, we've got such exquisite sensors to understand what's on the surface of the ocean, what's on roads and streets, what's flying in the air. And we're building this infrastructure to have just better and better insights where, you know, I can pull up Google Earth and look anywhere on earth and get like exquisite imagery at a touch of a button. That's not very old or Google Maps and see anywhere on any road. You know, at sea, you can pull up where every ship is because of transponders that they have. And if they don't.

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Radar is incredible and satellites are providing more and more information over time. Undersea, we're basically still blind. And so, you know, just on the defense side, imagine such a vulnerability. And here's the reason it hasn't been decisive so far. It's been so hard to do that. I mean, look at the inventory of submarines as an example. There's just not many. They're very hard and expensive to make, but they're decisive combat tools because of the stealth. Like from their earliest days, you couldn't detect them.

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You couldn't really defeat them. And they were decisive combat tools that could blockade and prevent maritime freedom of maneuver on the seas. You look at how much of the cargo still travels through and on the seas in a globally connected economy. It's staggering just to look at one strait being shut down for a couple of months and what that did to the oil and gas supply globally in the economy. And so from just a protect our way of life perspective, you know, harbors.

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So much of what we do comes in and out of harbors. There's so much vulnerability under sea right now. And so what's going to happen is as people begin to understand how to unlock and to make what's happening under sea more and more visible, those who will do that first will have a decisive advantage over those who don't. It will be like the first nation who discovered flight. It will be like the first folks who discovered airborne drones. It was such a decisive advantage on the battlefield that there's...

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a national imperative, I would say on par with like any of the great advances we've made in tech to unlock undersea from a robotics and autonomous perspective, because it hasn't happened yet. And so, you know, what happened when hypersonics became in production, right? It became a decisive advantage. And, you know, we're still struggling with what to make of that as a country, but like you have to bring national parity into play in the defense sector. so.

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And so undersea, it's going to happen. We need to be first and we need to have overwhelming quantities and capabilities underwater. Because when you think about how much is traveling on and around the seas, rested in harbors right now, if your defenses can simply be outnumbered by the quantity of things that are inbound, it's free shots on goal. And so whoever figures out how to be able to make sense and close the distance over long distances underwater is going to literally see

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a mass of undefended targets. And so if you look at what's happening between the Ukraine force and those that it's going against right now with unmanned surface vessels by and large, they're very hard to detect and they've been very, very effective. When that starts happening underwater, it's going to be even a worse problem for whoever has to deal with it. And the only reasonable approach is to be first have parity and have a good defense.

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Most people miss about like drone security in the space is that as soon as you develop an offensive capability, as much or more resources goes into defending against it and under C that means you have to have just as much capability and just as many platforms to defend against what's inbound. And, you know, I don't want to say too much about that, but there is an enormous opportunity on, both sides of the fence there. So.

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It just is a patron and somebody who loves our country. It's just incredibly important. If we don't do it, somebody needs to do it to figure out how to mass, smart, long duration platforms underwater for all of those reasons. And then, you know, interestingly, if you shift over to the commercial side, the problems are no less hard and the solutions really aren't there either. Oil and gas cable infrastructure. Like if you look at the amount of information that still travels and cables under seas between continents and

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and data centers, right? That's an undersea cables issue. Like so much of the information that we rely on for our economy and for our way of life travels on those cables still. The oceans are real big, hard to defend place, right? So you need to make sure that you've got capability to monitor those cables and to understand what's happening. Oil and gas exploration. costs like over a million dollars a day right now to do operations, to do oil and gas exploration, as well as the surveys. There's just, it's a huge demand. And so

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I think there's like no better time because it's happening. We're going to unlock undersea. think America should be at the forefront of that. I think it's the benefit of the world. And it's not a matter of if we're going to, it's a matter of when. And I just prefer that when is first.

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Mat Vogels (41:22)

Incredible roundup. That is awesome. Do you have from a timeline perspective? I mean, is it over the next five years, decade, 20 years, where do you see some of those things that you're talking about start to really ramp up from like a possibility standpoint? Obviously you guys are at the forefront of that.

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Jon (41:39)

I think the moment that the U.S. decides that they're going to put a lot of resources into delivering many, of these underwater systems, right? We've already done it for drones. There's amazing programs. My hat's off to the department. They're basically going out and buying in bulk to get the most effective, long range, capable airborne drones out there. It's going to change the nature of the battlefield. I'm so proud of all the reforms that are happening in that regard. That'll transition. It's happening right now for surface vessels, know, driverless ships that we're building.

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It's going to happen underwater. And the moment that it does and other countries invest in the same, which in my opinion is going to be unlocked by the ability to make sense of where you're at and do tactical decisions in combat underwater autonomously. That's the key that's going to unlock all that. You're going to just see this massive influx of investment and systems that are going to be deployed underwater that will be very, very hard to keep track of.

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Mat Vogels (42:30)

Yeah. Incredible. or maybe Amir, anything that you want to add on to that? I know that that was an incredible response.

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Amir (42:39)

That's why I defer to John on these items. He's the repository of all information. But no, that's an incredible vision of what John described. I think what I would briefly add to that is there's such a mass of like, or the course of us building modern technologies in defense, there's always been focus on novel, exquisite niche type of platform that we've had for a long period of time.

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Mat Vogels (42:40)

Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Amir (43:05)

And it has paid off, but the warfare and the locus of like the warfare is moving towards more small autonomous and swarm type of systems. So it's like, they're never going to replace the large warships or the aircraft carriers or among other larger systems that we operate. And they do provide a certain level of deterrence in themselves. But we also need to put

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a strong amount of focus on building distributed autonomous small systems that are asymmetrical by nature. also not only they are, I think we should think of them as like not as a system that are acting against our larger niche platform, but they're complementary and supplementary part of our larger force as a whole. So we keep our main

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trust and the focus on those larger system, but there's a strong work that needs to go into how to build these distributed autonomous system that complement that force. So you have that asymmetrical capability that can come to bear in the places where you just cannot deploy your larger systems. And I think a lot of that will start to become more and more apparent the more you start to have these conflicts. So for example, I mean,

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You see Ukraine as a nation that does not have like a large or recognized Navy for the fact that they've crippled Russia's Black Sea fleet. Similarly, Iran has no recognizable Navy, you know, whatever they even had, we destroyed it. But they still with like, you know, a few gun boats and speed boats and rocket launchers and some old Soviet mines, they're holding a major shipping channel as a hostage. And so you get into like situations where asymmetrical capabilities

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have such high leverage that as we're building a new and novel system, we also need to pay some amount of money that should go into standing up new programs and new capabilities. And I think DOW is starting to wake up to that reality with all the new acquisition reforms and different PAE offices. I 100 % love all that, that wherever the department is waking up and as a country,

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We're realizing the fact that we have fallen quite behind in that zone. So we need to bring up what John said, like parity to our adversaries and then leapfrogging them in capability so that we actually hold major battlefield advantage.

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Mat Vogels (45:30)

That's awesome. Any other either companies, problem sets or industries in the ocean specifically that are completely unrelated maybe to what you guys are doing or what we've spoken about that you also are excited about over the next five to 10 years.

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Amir (45:44)

I would say data centers in ocean. That's pretty amazing. I love seeing pantalas. mean, independently we had that idea, but we were just like, I don't know, you we don't want to put nukes in an unattended environment and maybe, you know, industry and the regulations are open to that. But that's a really cool idea. I think data centers in the ocean. I think what long-term that I am really excited about, think

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Mat Vogels (45:58)

Hahaha

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Amir (46:11)

that becomes a possibility with the advent of like a smaller and micro and nano nuclear reactors coming into play. I envision a time where you would have like a, know, battery pack that's being powered off of a, you know, very, very nano nuclear reactor and the water vessel that can operate for super extended periods of time. So your endurance and payload capability become like

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Mat Vogels (46:36)

Mm-hmm.

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Amir (46:40)

secondary and I think that will unlock next level of capabilities that could be delivered underwater.

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Mat Vogels (46:48)

How about you?

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Jon (46:50)

I think it's the integration of everything. At the moment, it can't be done. So it's not any one thing that really gets me excited, right? An unmanned surface vessel that's 10 times larger than the largest group through a merchant we have right now. OK, that's cool. But like.

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How do you integrate all of the flying systems that we have with all the sailing systems on the surface, with all the undersea systems on the surface, and make it seamless? And so what's really lacking right now that I'm most excited about is the integration of these technologies in a way that makes them function together to achieve one outcome without any seam or gap. Because right now, the communicating between something on the water surface and underneath it is a huge issue.

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You know, air to the ship is probably not that bad. But like and then there's no autonomy that can have them collaboratively do one thing together. And so again, it's like we're building all these individual. I think about it actually in terms of like cars. Imagine every car on the road communicate autonomously with every other car on the road. So every car knew its location and intent before it did something like in theory, you would never have an accident again. We could we've never done this. But like now imagine you stitch a whole system on the ocean together. So it's like a communications and autonomy problem that to me is

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Fascinating because the sum total and value of the system that could do that is maybe 10 times more valuable than any one component that can do it on its own and to the best of my vantage point right now, nobody's even started to tackle that problem. And so there's a multi-domain maritime problem. That's just absolutely fascinating to me.

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Mat Vogels (48:09)

Yeah.

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Yeah, I like that. The connective tissue of all those things is going to be amazing. And they're all going to be like a domino effect as these new things are unlocked, which is great. There's a lot of founders that are listening to this right now, they're all in the early stages of thinking about these things. They're in the fundraising mode. Any feedback or advice that you would give to founders that are building in

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in defense or maritime, maybe in like the earliest stages, they're about to go out and raise their first round of funding. What feedback would you give to them right now? Maybe Amir, starting with you.

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Amir (48:49)

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of tourist threats that come to mind of, you know, the last week where...

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Mat Vogels (48:51)

Hahaha!

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You guys are

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a year old-ish or 18 months, something like that. What is the... So you're still in the thick of it.

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Amir (49:01)

⁓

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Yeah, we probably started in like September 2025. So we're like barely a year in. We closed our pre-seed in February, we're to close our seed. I think there was a lot of Twitter threads about, you know, different VCs and horror stories. But I think in general, what I will tell people is like, A, don't take rejections personally. I just think that a lot of times, even if

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Mat Vogels (49:06)

Yeah, barely a year, not even.

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Amir (49:27)

VC generally likes you, likes your business model. They may not like the deal that's on the table or they may not like the long-term prospect of what you're doing. there's always going to be like somebody may back out of something because of like X, Y and Z. In majority of the times, people are looking for reasons not to invest in a company as opposed to the other way around. So there's always that element.

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Yeah, there are people who are genuinely really nice and then there people who are genuinely not nice. It's common with any industry and you're gonna run into your own set of father stories with that. But I think what I've experienced is that even if somebody has told me, okay, you know, I cannot invest because X, Y and Z, but I still wanna be helpful. You know, let me know what I can do with this or that. And there are people who would like make connections and there have been people who have come around who initially told me, like, you I don't think.

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this is going to work out or maybe because of that reason, they've come around and me, we really want to invest in you. And it's got to a point where we have to say, no, I'm sorry. We're actually committed to somebody else. So it's kind of a circle. I think that another thing that I'll tell people is, especially founders is VC word is like a very, even though there are thousands of VCs and thousands of VC offices, a lot of those people are deeply interconnected.

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So careful of how you operate in this world. Build something, demonstrate something. I think there's no substitute to having functional hardware and functional revenue that trumps everything. Like if you have those things on the table, it will be an answer to most of the things VCs are looking for.

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Mat Vogels (51:13)

John, what about you? Any feedback you give founders that are about to jump into the journey? You gave that great speech earlier about taking the leap in big swings. Any additional feedback there?

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Jon (51:22)

Yeah, so first of all, totally agree with Amir's advice not to take it personally. And I'm just going to be the foil for a moment. And I'm going to tell, I'm going to tell everybody to take it really personally because at 10 o'clock at night on a Sunday night, when you're working on like your third proposal for the weekend, you know, wanting to succeed will only get you so far, like being hating failure and despising rejection and taking personally every no thank you email that you get gives you enough. Me personally.

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to ask my family to proceed without me because I have work to do that I just cannot let go. And so I had to balance these two parts of it. Like Amir says, I would go crazy if I took everything personally all the time. I'd be a horrible human being to be around and maybe I am at this point. the other part of it is like, it takes a lot of work. And there have been times when I've flown cross country in very uncomfortable positions for like just a two hour meeting because we needed to close something and like, or up late at night doing something that is so

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drudgingly boring and critical to the business that like it needs to be done and it needs to be done well and like, you know, we're founders. There's nobody here to tell us to do anything. There's literally no deadlines we don't set for ourselves. There's no boss to report to. There's no chance of getting a promotion. Like all those things that existed for me in the Navy aren't here. And so like, you know, for me, being just a little bit very uncomfortable with rejection has been really helpful for me to like be able to

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have the fortitude in order to put in the work that I think allows you to earn the opportunities that we as a company are getting and I think any young company would want and need. so, I'd say that you just tap into whatever that is and make sure that your family understands that it's gonna be a wild ride for a year.

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Mat Vogels (53:03)

Yeah, there's nothing like it. Obviously, it's incredibly hard and can be rewarding. heard from, you know, I started multiple companies, shut multiple companies down. it's way more, the fulfilling moments are very brief, but they do for whatever reason compel you to keep going enough to outweigh the many more hard moments. But yeah, there's nothing like it.

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We could talk forever about the founder journey, about what you guys are building, but that's all time we have for today. I would love to do, we'll do like a year from now, two years from now type of thing. I think this industry in general is just right at that tipping point. So this will maybe be first of many. Thank you both for being on today. Where can we continue to follow along with your journey on the socials online and both of you guys.

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Amir (53:53)

Yeah, Twitter and LinkedIn or X and LinkedIn. John does most of the LinkedIn stuff. do most of the X stuff, but yeah, yeah. I'm encouraging him to be on X more. think X is a great place right now, especially with the whole El Segundo like founder and builder people. It's just amazing to be part of that. So yeah, we'll post a lot of stuff there and

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Mat Vogels (54:01)

Nice. So that's perfect.

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Amir (54:17)

I think we'll announce the updates through all those channels.

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Mat Vogels (54:20)

Love it. And you guys in LA or El Segundo, where are you guys located out of?

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Amir (54:26)

So we're in multiple locations. We're getting a large place in Torrance right now in the process of negotiations. But yeah, Torrance is where we want to be.

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Mat Vogels (54:35)

Nope, amazing. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for being on. We'll put all the links in the show notes to wherever you guys wanna go. But thank you again. What you're building is very exciting in an industry, I think, that is unparalleled over the next decade or so of excitement. So thanks for being on today.

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Amir (54:53)

Thanks, Fred. Thanks for having us.

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Jon (54:53)

Yeah,

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Thank you.

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Mat Vogels (54:55)

Absolutely.

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Have a good one.

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