Erin Price-Wright, General Partner at a16z, discusses the challenge of rebuilding domestic US hardware manufacturing and supply chains.
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 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.”