Insight
Price-Wright: Building a mining tech company requires end-to-end vertical integration
“We actually do believe you have to control every single piece of the entire journey, the entire life cycle of, you know, an atom of metal end to end to actually be able to build a tech company here. This is not about, you know, a point solution for one particu…”
Opinion
Elon Musk, SpaceX, and Tesla trained a cohort of hardware-software engineers
“There's definitely a spectrum, and I would frankly really credit Elon Musk, both from the SpaceX and Tesla perspective, with a lot for really training up engineers that have fluency in hardware and software.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Reshoring US manufacturing is impossible without high reliance on autonomy
“And I don't think that's gonna happen With the way sort of labor economics work globally, if a huge part of the way we manufacture in the future is not driven by autonomy.”
Assertion Contradicted
All robotic arm components currently originate from Shenzhen, China
“Right now, all the components for robotic arms, everything that you might, that might go into an autonomous factory is all coming from Shenzhen.”
Assertion Partly supported
Price-Wright: Grid interconnection takes a decade; transformers face 20-year backlogs
“Getting a new project onto the grid today, you know, you sign up for interconnection, it could take a decade. There's a backlog of twenty-plus years to get a new transformer.”
Assertion Partly supported
Price-Wright: Only one US plant produces steel for electrical transformers
“First of all, there's, like, one company that makes these. And there's, like, one plant in the U.S. That produces the right type of steel that you need in order to make these transformers.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Price-Wright: American consumers will reject utility control over home thermostats
“I do think though, okay, pushing back on that, like, I think that the, American consumer will fully organ reject that level of that dictation over how they use that.”
Opinion
Price-Wright: Top-down software sales to utilities like PG&E are unrealistic
“The idea that you're gonna go sell a software tool to a PG&E or similar and have, like, a reasonably speedy top-down implementation where you actually get good signal and metrics and can actually do interesting things with that data, to me, I find, like, a lit…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Price-Wright: Weather PhDs are the highest-paid personnel on energy trading desks
“When you look at energy desks, like for, you know, the big hedge funds or energy trading companies, their weather guy is usually the highest paid person on the desk outside the portfolio manager.”
Assertion Contradicted
Price-Wright: Microsoft contracted over a third of Georgia's electricians last year
“When Microsoft was building their new data center in Georgia last year, at one point, they had on staff at Microsoft, or on contract, more than a third of the electricians in the state of Georgia.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Price-Wright: Palantir's role in finding Bin Laden drove its commercial sales
“A large reason why we were able to sell to customers like BP and others were, you know, people liked that Palantir was the software that they used to find Bin Laden. So, you know, it made it easier to sell to some of these more traditional enterprises.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Full-stack hardware engineers are a16z's highest-demand role behind AI engineers
“So the highest demand jobs in our portfolio today, other than perhaps AI engineers, are people who have full stack hardware and software experience, whether it's mechanical, electrical, et cetera.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Price-Wright: US supply chains are dangerously reliant on China
“Our supply chains are highly reliant on China. It's a huge problem. We have to figure out how to address it. And that means investing in mining in the US again.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Price-Wright: Venture capital won't directly fund multi-billion-dollar energy megaprojects
“We're not gonna move the needle on, you know, these multi-billion dollar megaprojects in the US. Like, it doesn't, you know, we're not gonna build, we're probably not the best people to figure out how to, you know, capitalize and build, you know, a multi-billi…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Price-Wright: The energy sector will be a primary market for physical robotics
“I think the energy industry is probably medium to long term, like, one of the most prime spots to deploy physical autonomy.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Autonomy-driven hardware economy creates jobs not requiring college degrees
“We're talking about job creation for a whole class of folks that don't necessarily need a degree to participate in this autonomy-driven hardware economy.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hardware-focused engineering fields will see huge demand in coming year
“And what I think we're going to see is huge demand for engineers in Areas that are much more hardware focused, so things like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, controls engineering are gonna be in really high demand over the coming year as indust…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
a16z portfolio companies recruit hardware talent from non-traditional feeder schools
“And what we're finding is that actually those, ah, companies are having to go outside of kind of traditional tech feeder schools in order to find that talent. So we're actually seeing an interesting rise of schools like Georgia Tech, Colorado School of Mines, …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
A new class of robotic teleoperation jobs will emerge soon
“I expect that there'll be an entire kind of class of, Jobs related to that arising over the next few years.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
CHIPS Act reshoring will bring forgotten semiconductor jobs back to U.S.
“So there's, I expect there to be, with kind of the rollout of the CHIPS Act, I expect as chip manufacturing comes back to the US that it's an entire class of jobs that we just have literally never had here. Maybe we did for like five years in the sixties, righ…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Heavy industries face massive labor gaps over the next 3-5 years
“So huge opportunities in some of these industries where we're just seeing, you know, massive labor gaps over the coming, I don't know, three to five years.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Market forces will drive software engineering talent into physical hard tech
“I think a lot of it will be market-driven. It's about capitalizing on this sort of romantic desire to build stuff that I think is in the air right now.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Price-Wright: Mining is one of the largest untapped tech markets
“Mining sort of screams one of the largest markets in the world. Very little adoption of technology.”
Assertion Supported
Price-Wright: Texas doubled its solar power capacity in three years
“Texas has doubled their solar capacity in the last approximately three years.”
