Joby, Dirac & Allen Control: The Future of Air, AI & Defense Tech

America’s industrial base is being rebuilt by a new generation of founders at the intersection of aerospace, AI, and defense. In this Sourcery episode, host Molly O’Shea sits down with three leaders driving the reindustrialization movement, Eric Allison (Chief Product Officer, Joby Aviation), Filip Aronshtein (CEO, Dirac), and Steve Simoni (President, Allen Control Systems) Together, their stories highlight how capital-intensive, frontier-defining companies are raising billions from elite venture funds and strategics like Toyota, Founders Fund, Coatue, Craft Ventures, 8VC, Baillie Gifford, and Uber. The conversation captures the urgency, conviction, and vision behind America’s reindustrialization — from flying cars in Dubai to AI factories in New York to autonomous defense systems in Texas. This conversation is part of Sourcery’s “Made in America” Mini-Series recorded at the Reindustrialize 2025 Summit. 1. Eric Allison: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-m-allison/ 2. Filip Aronshtein: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fila/ 3. Steve Simoni: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevensimoni/ 4. Molly O’Shea: ⁠https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠ https://x.com/MollySOShea%E2%81%A0 5. Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryvc⁠ https://x.com/sourceryvc%E2%81%A0 Brought to you by: • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. As a Sourcery Listener you get: 75,000 points after spending $3,000 on Brex card(s), white-glove onboarding, $5,000 in AWS credits, $2,500 in OpenAI credits, & access to $180k+ in SaaS discounts. On top of $500 toward Brex travel, $300 in cashback, plus exclusive perks (like billboards..) visit → https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. Visit: https://turing.com/sourcery • Carta http://carta.com/sourcery—Carta connects founders, investors, and limited partners through software purpose-built for private capital. Trusted by 65,000+ companies in 160+ countries, Carta’s platform of software & services lays the groundwork so you can build, invest, and scale with confidence. Visit: https://carta.com/sourcery • Kalshi https://kalshi.com/sourcery—The largest prediction market and the only legal platform in the US where people can trade directly on the outcomes of future events: https://kalshi.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ Chapters: (00:00) Flying Cars, AI Factories, & Defense Autonomy (00:20) Eric Allison on Joby’s U. S. manufacturing expansion (02:00) Why Joby doubled down on vertical integration (03:30) FAA certification and building the first commercial air taxi (05:00) Going public via SPAC with Reinvent Technology Partners (07:00) Joby’s proving flights in Dubai & quiet aircraft acoustics (10:00) What the consumer Joby air taxi experience will look like (14:00) Scaling a 2,000+ person company with AI and data systems (17:00) Filip Aronshtein on reindustrialization urgency in Detroit (22:00) How Dirac’s BuildOS automates work instructions (25:00) Launching BuildOS & massive inbound demand (28:30) On-the-ground state of U. S. manufacturing (34:00) Using AI & AGI in manufacturing software (40:00) Steve Simoni on founding Allen Control Systems (42:00) Building Bullfrog turrets: AI machine guns vs drone swarms (45:00) The future of defense: robot-on-robot warfare

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We're actually going to be the air taxi provider for Dubai.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  I'm making the greatest weapon system in American history.

• 0:05Speaker 02

  We're building the first automated work instruction platform.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  We're partnering commercially with Uber and with Delta to be able to integrate our service seamlessly into these different consumer-facing products. We realized that this is a very capital-intensive business. Toyota came in early as an investor.

• 0:19Speaker 03

  Toyota Motor Corporation announced it will invest $500 million in new funding for Joby Aviation.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  I was starting to get the feeling that the West was forgetting how to build great things, and I want to make sure that didn't happen. A lot of folks who actually knew how to do things correctly and took pride in that work are retiring. The net new talent that comes in that's addicted to TikTok doesn't care.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  I sold my last company to DoorDash.

• 0:40Speaker 04

  Imagine selling your startup to DoorDash and then turning around and building an AI-powered machine one.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  And then, right when the deal closed, Putin invaded Ukraine.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  And we saw very early on that the countermeasures we were investing in as a country, I don't think those are going to be long-term sustainable.

• 0:59Molly O'Shea?

  Eric Alson. Philip. Aaronstein. Steve, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:14Molly O'Shea?

  Eric Alson, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:18Molly O'Shea?

  We're at day two of Re-Industrialize, and we're talking about manufacturing in America. You had some big news yesterday for Joby. Could you share more about that?

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So, we were really excited to announce that we are expanding our California facilities and actually doubling our capacity overall at our pilot manufacturing site in Marina, California. And we're just opening a new building. And that's really exciting because we've been doing a lot of work there for a while. But this represents the next step in the evolution of our, basically, made-in-America manufacturing that we're doing for this new generation of electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. And actually, so we are actually also taking steps to expand into Ohio. We acquired a building, we've been refurbishing it, we now have equipment coming in.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  We're training employees at our California facilities to start production of parts out of that Ohio facility. That'll be part of our certified aircraft that we're building.

• 2:20Molly O'Shea?

  So exciting. So why did you decide to double down in America versus manufacture elsewhere?

• 2:27Speaker 00

  So we're a company that's born kind of on the coast of California, Santa Cruz, California. And we've really been investing in, from the very beginning, in an approach that I think in the industry, we call vertical integration. So we figured out very early on in the process of developing this revolutionary new type of aircraft, that the components, the parts to actually make this aircraft just weren't available. You couldn't buy them from anyone. You couldn't, you had to make them essentially. So that's in the DNA of Joby. We started doing that very early on. Our founder and CEO, Joe Ben Vert, was kind of, you know, he's a longtime engineer, a very successful serial entrepreneur

• 3:08Speaker 00

  in other industries. And he brought that experience to bear when Joby was started. And so we started to build out that capability. And we really value the idea of designing, building, and testing in as tight of a loop as you can, because that's how you drive innovation and this new wave of technologies that we're bringing to market. And so that kind of just led to that philosophy. We're building near where we are, right? And so we built the facilities to manufacture, to test everything that we have to do, all in that tightly knit way. And as we figure that out, then we can bring in other sites like Ohio, where we're actually expanding to those new locations, where we can take that learning span to that location, and put it together into the aircraft that we're building.

• 3:54Molly O'Shea?

  Are they going to be manufacturing two different aircrafts? I know that with this announcement, you also announced a new aircraft to your fleet. So

• 4:03Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 4:03Molly O'Shea?

  How are they going to strategically?

• 4:04Speaker 00

  So actually, everything will be feeding into this one aircraft. And we actually have a we have a nice representation of it here at Reindustrialize that people can see.

• 4:13Molly O'Shea?

  It's the most popular entrance.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really cool. We have it in a perfect location, like right at the front door. So it's great. Someday, people will just be able to land and walk right in, right? So that's not quite there yet, but working on it. We are working on the certification of our aircraft with the FAA. And what that entails is it's a very intensive process of first, working with the FAA to define what it means to even be able to design this type of an aircraft. So setting up the rules, essentially. And then working methodically downstream of those rules to to kind of define how you're going to meet the rules and all of the different myriad tests that you have to do to prove with with documentation and in many cases, FAA people actually witnessing the tests that

• 4:56Speaker 00

  you're doing and signing off, like literally signing off on it, that you are meeting the those rules and your your your performance of all of your little parts is mapping to what you agreed to. And that that's that process that we're in right now. So all of the stuff we're building, whether or not it's parts in Ohio or or lots of parts in California, that's all feeding into the aircraft that demonstrate the compliance to those rules to to get to the certification of the aircraft.

• 5:25Molly O'Shea?

  Joby is a operationally expensive, regulatory-heavy company, and you had decided to go public earlier on in the lifecycle than other companies. It's probably one of the largest like frontier tech companies that's public. What was the decision to do that earlier on than later? Like strategically, was it financing? Because now you get access to secondaries via public markets. What do you how do you think about that as you build out this like really CapEx-heavy business?

• 6:02Speaker 00

  I mean, I think that's that's all part of the equation. So we we were founded in 2009 and stayed very small for a long time, really understanding the fundamentals, the foundational pieces of that technology, understanding what needed to be invented, what worked, what didn't. And it was it was in 20, kind of 2019, 2020, I think, closed in 2020, we raised the first big round. It was a Series C that Toyota led. So Toyota came in early as a as an investor from one of their venture arms and then and then came in as and led the Series C, which is between 400 and 500 million that we that we raised. But we realized that this is a very capital-intensive business, and especially with a vertical-integrated model. We don't just vertically integrate down into building and designing, building and testing

• 6:47Speaker 00

  all of the components that go into the vehicle platform. We're actually vertically integrating up as well, I like to think of it as. So we're vertically integrating to the customers. So we're actually designing and building the software that then takes that vehicle, the aircraft, and lets you book it on demand, either through the app that we're developing or through one of our partners. So we're partnered commercially with Uber and with Delta, for example, to be able to integrate our service seamlessly into these different consumer-facing products that will allow anyone to get a ride, basically, when they want to. So all of that takes a lot of capital. And so we took advantage of an opportunity that presented itself in 21.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  We listed, we worked with one of the company, a SPAC company called Reinvent, which was a great partner, some great backers. And so we've been off to the races since then. And so, you know, hard at work at bringing this technology to market.

• 7:52Molly O'Shea?

  This is not financial advice, but I saw the stock last night and then this morning, and I was like, whoa, you guys had a little bit of a run-up the last couple of days.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're excited to see enthusiasm across the board for what we're doing. And so, you know, we think it's, we've got a lot of potential here. And we're really, really excited to be making great progress, whether or not it's in manufacturing or in testing. We actually, I was in Dubai a couple of weeks ago, where we have been doing a bunch of work with the UAE government there, and we're actually going to be the air taxi provider for Dubai once we launch. And so we were doing some initial proving flights in the desert, where it's like quite hot and actually surprisingly humid. And we were, I think, at the max temperature, we flew in with something like 43C, it's like 110 degrees, something like that.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  And it's kind of stress-testing a lot of our components and making sure the air conditioning works for the pilots and future passengers inside the aircraft. That's really fun, that we're able to show with real-world work that we're doing, like what this looks like, what it sounds like. That's a really important part of this. And it's, I don't think we have it here, but we have even a little experience, and you can see it online, actually, on... What the acoustics of this aircraft are like. This is actually one of the things we invested in really early. So that that time when we were really small, a lot of that early foundational work we were doing was understanding what are the trade offs? What are the different key innovations in technology that are necessary to make

• 9:25Speaker 00

  a product that actually can work? Because today you can get an air taxi in in New York and other places, but it's a helicopter, right? And and there's a kind of a a limit on the scaling that's possible with that technology for a really a couple of different reasons. Cost is one of them. It's pretty expensive. But another really important one is noise. And so, you know, if anyone that lives in near where the helicopters fly, I've talked to a lot of people that had the experience, like, yeah, it's just really loud, right? And it's it's great if you can do it, but it's it's really loud. And so we we really early on invested in the the foundational understanding of the physics to make a really quiet aircraft.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  And so that's part of even like what we were showing in Dubai to to the different folks that were were seeing those demonstrations and the proving flights that we're doing is just like letting people experience what the acoustics of this is like. And so it's it's hard to describe, but but basically, we could have this conversation when the aircraft is taking off and landing 300 feet away without really raising our voices. And then when it's up and flying, it's basically silent when it's overhead. So if at 1500 feet, which is pretty low, actually, flying, you just hear it go whisper as it comes by. And that's that's a really, really different experience when it comes to the acoustics of how these these aircraft work. And we've spent a lot of time and and energy investing into that to make something that's

• 10:50Speaker 00

  pretty remarkable for the ability to integrate them into communities and and have people want to have this, you know, in their backyard, basically.

• 11:00Molly O'Shea?

  So we're not going to have to wear headsets and microphones when we're cruising with our friends to dinner in XYZ city?

• 11:09Speaker 00

  You might still have to wear the headset, but maybe to hear the pilot. So it's it's kind of fun, though, to wear the headsets in the.

• 11:15Molly O'Shea?

  It's really fun. Let's let's be honest, it's fun.

• 11:20Molly O'Shea?

  I want to talk more about the consumer experience because it is, it's a delightful thing. We've been wanting flying cars for a while. I don't, I don't think helicopters are flying cars, but I think this is more akin to a flying car. So could you explain more of like what that experience will be like to the consumer?

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So fundamentally, you're going to open up an app on your phone. Maybe it's a Joby app, maybe it's Uber, our rideshare partner, and you'll select where you want to go. Just like today, you open up Uber and you say, I want to go to the airport, or I want to go to downtown or something. And, and the, in the Joby app, the only option will be Joby. But in the, in the Uber app, so you'll be able to kind of, you know, choose like the Joby option, which is going to be faster than any other way to go. And, and so then the reason why we're integrating and have partners, a partner like Uber for rideshare is that typically people won't be right next to where one of these aircraft

• 12:18Speaker 00

  can take off and land. So we think of as vertiports or skyports, like to call them. And, and so, you know, depending on where you are, a car will come and get you, just like a car picks you up today, if you're just going to ride in a car all the way. But instead of taking you to your destination and maybe sitting an hour or two of traffic or something, depending on where you're going, it'll just take you a few minutes to the nearest vertiport. And then what we're doing is building the backend technology that we can have multiple people kind of meeting just in time essentially at that vertiport, who are all kind of going in the same direction. So it's kind of a, kind of just in time shared ride type of experience, which helps to drive the economics better. So it's cheaper essentially per seat for the folks that want to, want to take the rides. And, and then when you

• 12:59Speaker 00

  land at the, wherever it is you're going, and kind of the, the destination vertiport, cars will be kind of dispatched just in time again to pick you up and the other people who are on the aircraft to, to go to your final destination. If you're close enough, you can just walk, which sometimes is a really great experience. But, you know, if you're not, a car will take you there. So that's the idea of this kind of seamless multimodality, I like to call it, whereas you know, car, Joby car is, or car, Joby walk is kind of the, the idea. And it's all kind of woven together and the technology just makes it work in the backend. You don't have to think about it. But that might seem difficult, and it is, but we actually have done this and tested this out. So I came from Uber where I ran the Elevate team previously before Joby acquired

• 13:43Speaker 00

  it. And we actually had a product that we built and ran, actually, for a while to test this all out. We used helicopters. We were in Manhattan. And we actually, though, had, this showed up in the Uber app and you could, people selected it. We did lots of trips for people and we kind of like demonstrated how you could do this matching and you could get people to kind of meet just in time at the heliport. In fact, one of the interesting challenges was that a lot of the Uber drivers had never dropped people off at a heliport before. And where it was, it was like easy to miss. And so we actually ended up having to put our general manager out there with a sign, say like, "Turn here." Like, that was one of the interesting operational problems we had to solve to make it work. But I think

• 14:26Speaker 00

  it was a really great proof point that you can do this. And if you build the right technology backend, you can make this a really great experience.

• 14:32Molly O'Shea?

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• 15:16Molly O'Shea?

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• 15:34Molly O'Shea?

  One of Sorcery's partners is Brex, and they're all about spending smarter, moving faster, and this seems very much in line with that. So they're focused on performance, and one of the things that they kind of help a lot of startups, enterprises with is become more efficient as organizations as they scale. For Joby, like, how do you think about... That when you scale up the company because it's so capital intensive, like, how are you moving internally? What systems are you constantly checking or like milestones are you reaching?

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's a, that's a great question. It's, um, you know, when you have, we have a couple thousand people working at Joby across all of the different sites and disciplines, you know, everything from folks who are building the composite parts that actually make up the aircraft to the folks writing the software that's, that's building that customer experience that I, that I was just describing. And so you have to keep people aligned and driving toward goals. And so we, we do a lot of that, you know, we set up goals and we drive people toward them. We drive to accomplishments and celebrate the accomplishments when we get there. And, but we also are building systems that, that help, that to help to, uh, help to make this easier too.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  So, you know, we're looking at how do we leverage some of the latest advances in AI across different aspects of the enterprise? Whether it's kind of like mundane things where, you know, it's like really easy now to get fantastic results on reading a, reading a shipping, a shipping slip, right? Or a packing slip in a, in a shipment. And you can, you know, integrate these tools right into, to systems, especially when you're developing them ourselves like we are. Do more advanced things like how do you, how do you start to, to kind of augment and, and enhance some of the, the, the work that engineers are doing across the board beyond just kind of, you know, the speeding up coding that, that lots of people are doing. We have that well, well embraced across our entire team.

• 17:31Molly O'Shea?

  That's so interesting. I just came across this company called Turing that helps build and deploy next generation AGI systems across real world problems. And so it brings up a funny question for, you know, these manufacturing as companies, physical products.

• 17:50Molly O'Shea?

  But a lot of them come down to data because you're collecting lots of data with like every flight, every test that you take off. How are you thinking about AGI and data within the organization?

• 18:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we are building kind of a really intense data foundation across the whole company. So electric aircraft are kind of massive data machines, basically, which is really, it's really cool. We have to choose what data to keep instead of what data to collect, right? So it's, it's a, or you know, we have a, we have a richness of data because every, computers run the whole airplane. And so they collect data at some crazy high rate. And you're like, well, I only need that every one, one a second instead of like 100 times a second or something, right? For the different data sources. So we generate gigabytes and gigabytes and gigabytes of data on every flight. And we've built a whole data system where every time we do a test flight, we pull like very fine-grained data off the airplane. It

• 18:45Speaker 00

  goes right up a secure pipe into the cloud. And then a whole bunch of processing gets kicked off and dashboards show up for all of our engineers to review that data. And that all happens just automatically every time we fly. And we're building on that foundation. And one of our partners on this is Databricks. We use it pretty heavily across, across everything. And with that vertical integration, you know, we have, we can, we can bring everything into the same context, whether that's flight test data, manufacturing data, safety data for our enterprise safety management system that we're building. And, and that's really important to be able to, to, to work with your data in a single context and then do really interesting things with it as, as our developments and the work that we're doing rolls forward.

• 19:29Molly O'Shea?

  Hopefully, we get some joby AI agents soon.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  We have, we have lots of agents running internally.

• 19:36Molly O'Shea?

  That's exciting. As we wrap up, I really want to know, what are you most looking forward to this year?

• 19:42Speaker 00

  So we've got a lot more great stuff in store. We're making progress across every front, whether it's flight testing, whether or not it's the manufacturing certification work is the kind of the north star that we're all driving toward. So I can't wait to, to tell, tell the world about more of the things that we're doing in the, the weeks and months ahead.

• 20:02Molly O'Shea?

  Exciting. Well, I can't wait to go check out the aircraft you have outside. Maybe I'll get in it. I don't know if I can.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  Absolutely. You can, we have, we have a selfie station. So you can, you can take a selfie.

• 20:14Molly O'Shea?

  We're gonna go straight down there. Okay. Well, thank you so much.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 20:19Speaker 06

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• 20:55Molly O'Shea?

  Philip Ehrenstein, welcome to Sorcery.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you for having me, Molly.

• 21:00Molly O'Shea?

  How is it out there to reindustrialize?

• 21:02Speaker 02

  It is packed.

• 21:03Molly O'Shea?

  It is?

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Yes. You've never seen so many people who care about saving the West. It is exciting. I'm excited, excited to be here, excited to see so many familiar faces. Some would actually characterize it as really just a really big Twitter meetup, but it's actually more than that. A lot of folks from all over the world coming to reindustrialize to talk about how do we turn the tides of the degrading industrial base that we are looking at in this country.

• 21:25Molly O'Shea?

  And we are in the heart of America.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  In Detroit.

• 21:28Molly O'Shea?

  Detroit.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  It's where we did it. It's where we did it. It's where we're gonna, we're gonna continue doing it.

• 21:33Molly O'Shea?

  And do it better.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Do it better than has ever been done before. Yeah.

• 21:36Molly O'Shea?

  So how are you keeping yourself energized today?

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Well, thanks to our sponsor at Dirac, C4, the energy drink of America. That's how I'm staying afloat. We stock these in the office. I actually live, so I'm from New York.

• 21:51Molly O'Shea?

  Are they actually a sponsor?

• 21:52Speaker 02

  No, that would be awesome. C4, if you're watching this, we would love for you to sponsor our company or to work with you in some capacity. We actually stock C4s. Like, we have some Red Bull, but like mostly it's C4 in the fridge.

• 22:04Molly O'Shea?

  Figure out who their manufacturer is, get integrated.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think Cellucor owns them. That's my, it's my understanding. But I mean, these are delicious. I'm a, I've been taking C4 as a pre-workout for roughly 10 years, so.

• 22:16Molly O'Shea?

  How's that going?

• 22:17Speaker 02

  That's great. It's great. I love C4. My heart might be exploding, but it's actually, it's with passion and pride for America and not the stimulants that are in C4 pre-workout.

• 22:27Molly O'Shea?

  Talking about passion and pride for America. We are at Reindustrialize. What excites you most about this year at Reindustrialize?

• 22:36Speaker 02

  So there are a lot of, so last year's Reindustrialize was really great in that we got a bunch of different companies to come together and try it out. Like, you know, this is, there are manufacturing conferences all over the place. These are not like new things that happen, but there hasn't been so much of a, like a Silicon Valley tech orientation towards them. And they haven't been positioned with such a level of aggression. Like, the, the mission of Reindustrialize is we cannot let the American industrial base degrade anymore. You go to, you know, your average manufacturing conference. We were at Automate this year, really cool conference, a lot of really cool companies also here in Detroit. It's actually down the block.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  It was about a month or two ago, but the, you know, the vibe there, the, the environment there is not sort of, um, there, there isn't urgency. And Reindustrialize is about urgency. It's about addressing a really, really dangerous trend that we're all witnessing happen to the American industrial base. And that's its degradation. And if that degradation continues, it will eventually result in collapse. And with that, our way of life. So that is the sentiment. That is the patriotism and fervor and energy that a lot of people are bringing to the conference this year especially.

• 23:49Molly O'Shea?

  There are some critical players in the building this week. We even have some protesters. I don't know.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  I love the protesters. Yeah.

• 23:56Molly O'Shea?

  We love that. It shows that you're doing something.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  This is the thing. If you didn't have protesters, it would mean that what you're doing doesn't matter. Right? So I, I love the protesters. It's hilarious. They are like Palantir protesters for the most part.

• 24:09Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, they always have, you know, fangirls.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:11Molly O'Shea?

  Good for them.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  They're like, screw Alex, carb, stop working with the CIA. Hilarious because, you know, as everybody knows, Palantir runs the CIA, right? And so I find it amusing that protesters are coming out. There's only like maybe 10 of them out there. It's kind of disappointing. I was expecting a better turnout because like, you know, you know, you're not doing something, like you said, you know, you're not doing something special unless people are turning out to say you should stop it. So. They can come in, we can give them jobs. I know the whole reason they're protesting is because they're generally unemployed and unemployable, but you know, we could actually employ them in a production line. Detroit is a city that we have, I think, two and a half

• 24:46Molly O'Shea?

  million. Let's, let's show the future.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  It's like, we have two and a half million open jobs in manufacturing. We need more people who are willing to put down the phone, turn off TikTok and get on a production line. And the protesters, we can start with them.

• 24:58Speaker 06

  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. 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/sorcery. That's C-A-R-T-A dot com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y.

• 25:43Molly O'Shea?

  Production lines are fun. You are helping re-industrialize America. I want to talk about you as a critical power player. So what is Dirac?

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Dirac is a company driving America towards context-aware production planning. It's a new, new one-liner I'm going with lately. We at Dirac have built, actually, let me, I can give a little bit of background about myself, just for a little context. So my background's originally in electrical engineering and robotics. Spent a little bit of time over Northrop Grumman, you know, did a little bit of electrical engineering work, some mechanical engineering work, a little bit of technician work, and just got to see how, unfortunately, our kick, all of the infrastructure was and the manufacturing side of things. And wanted to just do something about it. I was starting to get the feeling that the West was forgetting how to build great things, and I wanted to make sure that didn't happen. And so, Dirac, at our company, we're building what we call the first automated work instruction platform. So we'll take a CAD file or 3D model of an assembly as an input, figure

• 26:36Speaker 02

  out the assembly sequence automatically, and then automatically generate 80, 90% of the assembly instructions for that system that we're trying to assemble. You can sort of liken it to, you ever built IKEA furniture? You know, a little paper instruction book tells you how to build a thing. Imagine that, but instead of being like paper, which is what we actually have today in like most manufacturing facilities, you'll either have like a like white binder that's like this thick with like a bunch of like photos and it looks like templates out of like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. That is like what the modern work instruction looks like today. It is unfortunately super paper-based, very archaic, very manual to make, takes like weeks or months to make, and they suck, right? It's just like awful. So that is basically what people used to build planes and engines and cars and missiles all across the world,

• 27:21Speaker 02

  but especially the United States. And so what we've done is with Build OS, we take your CAD file as an input. We will figure out the sequence automatically and then in this 3D animated rendered environment, generate the assembly instructions for your manufacturing team.

• 27:36Molly O'Shea?

  So does this make it easier for workers, more efficient? Like what are the positive externalities of this?

• 27:45Speaker 02

  There are a bunch.

• 27:45Molly O'Shea?

  It's a lot.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Instead of taking like weeks or months to do your production plan, you can do a couple of minutes, a couple of hours, a couple of days tops, making the work instruction. And then what ends up happening is, you know, we like to say like a picture is worth a thousand words, but an animation is worth a million. Instead of a like literal Ikea, you know how awful it is to follow IKEA's assembly instructions? Imagine somebody's like, all right, build this missile with this picture. Guys in the shop floor are looking at them. They're like, wow, like I don't know how the hell this thing. So tons of questions. Things are built wrong. Things are built really poorly. Unfortunately, in many cases, scrap rates are super high because of that in many different cases. And so what we found is not only have like, as our software made it fun and like actually enjoyable to do, like to make work instructions, but it makes lives a lot better for the guys on

• 28:29Speaker 02

  the shop floor. And so operators, like technicians who are actually doing the assembly on the shop floor, have this like interactive 3D animated guide to like, Tell them how to make a thing. And we found that it also radically reduces like the, the high skill labor requirements needed to like bring new folks into your manufacturing facility. A lot, a lot of teams are reliant very, very heavily on tribal knowledge. And so there was stuff that like, the average, you know, employee at like, you know, at a mid-market manufacturer, has been there for 30 years. They barely use work instructions anymore because it's all in the dome, back of the head. And because of that, when they retire, they take all that tribal knowledge with them about how those things actually fit together at their facility. And so that is causing a lot of really cool companies to unfortunately either

• 29:13Speaker 02

  shut products down, or even shut their facility down. So that is what we are enabling the, basically the 21st century upgrade to the modern American manufacturer by making sure that they do not have to shut down their facility and can do agile context to work production planning.

• 29:29Molly O'Shea?

  The next generation workforce.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Indeed, indeed. Also, it's like, these guys are used to get like, engineers love building tools for other engineers. Nobody really unfortunately cares about like folks in manufacturing. And so tooling hasn't really been built for them. It's like, cool and fun and useful and interesting. And so from that perspective, it actually like, looks as, it looks like a more interesting and fun career path for like, somebody coming out of school to think like, what do I do with my life?

• 29:56Molly O'Shea?

  Who uses a book anymore?

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But it, it's just a lot. It makes the job more exciting for people who are critical.

• 30:04Molly O'Shea?

  Right. Machines are fun. So if you can operate them faster, better, why not? Very true. Okay. So Build OS had a really good launch vibe set, campaign. I think you made a video, everything like that.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:18Molly O'Shea?

  How's Build OS doing?

• 30:20Speaker 02

  It is ripping. We have been inundated with inbound. We need to hire aggressively. We're actively hiring right now.

• 30:27Molly O'Shea?

  What are you hiring for?

• 30:28Speaker 02

  We're hiring for software engineers. Turns out AI is not going to replace all of them. And we actually need really, really smart software engineers to come help us build. We have a bunch of different things we need to, you know, start building out, different modules, different extensions to the product. We

• 30:45Speaker 02

  As it stands right now have so we spent about six months rebuilding the product from scratch. It's now just relaunched it beginning of April. So now enterprise grade ITAR compliant. And basically since then, past like a couple of months, like I mentioned, a lot of inbound been going live with a bunch of these customers, companies that I mean, based in the US, based in Europe, companies that are in aerospace and fence, automotive, agriculture and construction machinery, maritime, it's just been good. It's been really good. A bunch of really exciting partners, stuff that we're going to announce sort of gradually over time.

• 31:18Molly O'Shea?

  Any fun announcements we can bring up now?

• 31:21Speaker 02

  Not on the pod today, unfortunately. Soon.

• 31:24Molly O'Shea?

  Soon.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, we got one of our, one of our really exciting, like very large scale partners. We, they actually came by our office in the Empire State Building about, actually it was on Monday. So on this really cool partnership video, like, you know, us plus them, plus the customer that we, we partnered like to, to, to serve. And that one is, that's gonna be really cool video. They flew their whole team out.

• 31:49Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really cool.

• 31:51Molly O'Shea?

  I can't wait to see it.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  It's gonna rip.

• 31:53Molly O'Shea?

  I want to talk about your customers.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 31:56Molly O'Shea?

  Phil, Philip, Phil.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:58Molly O'Shea?

  You have been traveling around the US, knocking on doors, going directly to the manufacturing facilities and factories. What is the state of, I don't know, the market? What is like the on the ground read? Like, how are these facilities actually running?

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Um, people cannot get product out the door fast enough. It's sort of this, there's two problems that we see, maybe three, that there's for some types of systems, they aren't getting the demand that they used to. And so we're seeing like second, third, fourth order effects that result from offshoring where like a tier two supplier in Long Island, for example, that used to sell to like a tier one supplier that was based in Connecticut, that Connecticut based facility was like offshore to China. And now like China has much, you know, much cheaper labor. They have their own supplier base. And so it becomes a lot more difficult for that tier two supplier to sell. So we're finding that's the case. And then a lot of

• 32:57Speaker 02

  the times when you have like really complex, very sophisticated and interesting like sub products or like different sub assemblies that you might like want to sell. You, it might've been super useful and, you know, solve a really, really important problem 20 years ago as like a product, but because the people that you're selling to have built their own supply chain somewhere else, this like net new interesting novel product like doesn't really have demand anymore. And so you're facing like, there's not as much demand and then the supply when they do actually want to like build that thing because somebody orders it or something like that, their supply chains also just all over the place. They can't get parts as quickly as they need to. I would say

• 33:38Speaker 02

  quality is going down, unfortunately. Quality's going down. There has generally been like an aging out of the American industrial base, the modern American manufacturers around like early 50s. And because of that, a lot of folks who actually knew how to do things correctly and well and took pride in that work are retiring. And in a lot of cases, like the net new talent that comes in, it's like addicted to TikTok, like doesn't care. So, yeah, I mean, I would say that's a little depressing to see, but we're also simultaneously seeing at like a higher level with tariffs, with a lot of like the sentiment that is starting to brew, like reindustrialize is a net new novel movement that is very exciting

• 34:23Speaker 02

  and very excited to be a part of it. But we're also seeing that they're like the average, like American mid-market manufacturer, a company like, one of our customers, a company called Spudnik. Spudnik makes potato harvesting equipment. You drag behind your tractors. Awesome company. Actually, we brought a guy out from Spudnik to actually come join us here and reindustrialize and run one of the breakout rooms with us.

• 34:43Molly O'Shea?

  I love potatoes.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  They're, they're sick. These guys are based in Blackfoot, Idaho.

• 34:47Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  And they're, they're awesome. They make some of the coolest machines. You should. We're actually, we're actually going on site with them pretty soon.

• 34:54Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:54Molly O'Shea?

  All right. Let's get the camera.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  We, so we actually do. So I actually will ping you about this. This is like a pretty up and coming thing. So they're awesome. And so if you look at a company like them, they are run by people who care. Like they want to win. They want to drive value for their customers and they build some really crazy, complex stuff. And so you look at a company like that and you can see this sort of like undercurrent of like we like things are falling apart around us like we need to win. We need to work hard. We need to continue working hard. We need to invest in net new technology to like maintain our edge. And so we're seeing that like across the Midwest. We're seeing that across sort of like it's kind of interesting. You can break up like the manufacturing market into a bunch of different categories and sub verticals and

• 35:38Speaker 02

  whatever. But the one really simple way to think about it is there are OEMs and there are mid-market manufacturers. They're also like SMBs, but for the most part, I'm just going to talk about OEMs. Sorry. Well, actually, funny enough, there's like a different categorization. You should actually be thinking about it with respect to, which is OEMs and tier one through three suppliers is like one breakup of them versus mid-market and enterprise. This is actually when I talk about like our market and how we like work with customers, it's actually like a two by two. Most people assume that if you're talking about OEM, you think like Ford or Toyota or Boeing, you assume that an OEM equals an enterprise. And when you think about like a supplier, you imagine that they're mid-market, but actually like there are mid-market OEMs, there are enterprise tier one through three suppliers. Sorry, I'm

• 36:22Speaker 02

  getting like in the weeds on this, but there is a massive population of like mid-market OEMs. These companies that like are not doing bajillions in revenue, like the Fords of the world, but they still make like an end product. Like you know, John Deere, right? John Deere is like a massive enterprise that makes like, you know, bajillions of different, you know, tractors and whatnot. But there are companies that look a lot like John Deere, but they're like, you know, they might have one or two facilities. And so those companies need to maintain their edge and they don't have as much capital and as much money to just like throw at like crazy fancy schmancy AI solutions and whatnot to like solve their problems. And so they have to get really creative. And so we, because we

• 37:05Speaker 02

  work with a lot of these mid-market OEMs, we're seeing a lot of that creativity and willingness to adopt net new technology, which is for us, super exciting.

• 37:13Molly O'Shea?

  Maybe AGI is not hitting the farmland yet, but it is being integrated into software. For you, how are you thinking about AGI within your product?

• 37:23Speaker 02

  It's actually really interesting.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  I think you have to have really context aware, structured software to then layer AI on top of it, right? AI as a like technology, like LLMs as a technology are really useful for taking a massive like struc- like massive swaths of structured information and condensing them into useful, like high utility applications and use cases. And so if you don't have that context, you can't do the AI magic, right? Like, a lot of the LLM bots and like AI bots are useful from their perspective of like, you know, they were trained on like the internet. And so you can ask like these, like you can ask a chatbot like questions that are somewhere

• 38:11Speaker 02

  out there. Like it might be in Wikipedia. It's just like freely accessible, freely accessible public information. Very, very good for that. But like in manufacturing, like this is tribal knowledge. This is not written down anywhere in or not in a structured, organized way. And so in order to actually use AI in an effective way in manufacturing, you have to lay down the structure first. You have to collect that tribal knowledge. And that is actually how we think about our software. And so we call Bill Oss like an 80/20 tool. We automate 80% of the grunt work of making the work instruction and the 10 or 20% that we're not automating, that is like the rule of thumb tribal knowledge type of stuff that you can't get from a CAD file. And so that's the stuff that lives inside of the head of the manufacturing engineer

• 38:54Speaker 02

  or operator that's been on the shop floor for 20, 30 years. And we end up serving as this like data aggregation platform for all that tribal knowledge and associated with specific components over time. And so the TLDR is, I think you have to aggregate all of that context and then layer in LLMs and AI in order to drive value around all of that tribal knowledge. And so that's kind of how we're going about it. We're aggregating the tribal knowledge and then for our customers, we will then leverage it to their advantage.

• 39:23Molly O'Shea?

  Sounds pretty defensible.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Dash, I mean, I hope so. My God. Yeah.

• 39:28Molly O'Shea?

  A lot of work. How are you spending smarter, moving faster?

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Good question. Well, as you, as you know, we a couple of months ago moved into a new office in the Empire State Building.

• 39:40Molly O'Shea?

  Can't imagine that was.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the so. No, no, not at all. So Empire State Building, incredible building, not necessarily the friendliest for startups. We're the only, I think we're one of the only tech companies in there. I think it's like us and then like LinkedIn has like 10 floors.

• 39:56Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we're on the 47th floor. We're facing north and west.

• 40:00Molly O'Shea?

  Forty seven.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Forty seven.

• 40:02Molly O'Shea?

  Intentional?

• 40:03Speaker 02

  No, hilarious though, right? Very patriotic.

• 40:06Molly O'Shea?

  Very patriotic.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally unintentional, but 47th floor facing north and west. So we can see the Chrysler Building out the north side and the west. We're keeping an eye on New Jersey, making sure there aren't anything shifting. Yes. You know, those New Jerseyers. So when it comes to making purchasing decisions like that, thinking about how do we structure our finances in a way such that we have longevity and we're not just a, you know, flash in the pan, burn a bunch of money, you know, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend. It's kind of like the Silicon Valley mentality. We have to be very careful and intentional with how we make large scale purchasing decisions and how we can leverage them strategically. And I do think that like it does often make sense to spend money to grow. And we've been doing that in very strategic cases.

• 40:47Molly O'Shea?

  What do you think is like the most impactful thing that you have spent money on as an early stage founder?

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Like personally?

• 40:54Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Funny enough, I and I, this is like, we're not sponsored by them, but I love what they build. Eight Sleep. Like ironically, I bought, I'm, as an early stage founder, I'm broke. I got no money, but I thought, like, I looked at the price tag and I was like, boy, oh, boy. All right. And totally worth it. I recommend to everybody, changed my life completely. Like there's now, literally, there has been no greater an investment that I've ever made personally in my own life than buying an eight sleep.

• 41:23Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  Changed my life.

• 41:25Molly O'Shea?

  Eight sleep. Do you hear that?

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Permanently changed my life. Like I, yeah, it's straight up. I, like, I am telling my employees, like, you should go get an eight. Oh, you're not sleeping well? You should get an eight sleep.

• 41:38Molly O'Shea?

  How do you budget that in?

• 41:40Speaker 02

  I pay them enough to go buy an eight sleep.

• 41:42Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, good. Yeah, good. Love that.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Treat our guys well. Yeah, take care of our guys.

• 41:47Molly O'Shea?

  As we wrap up, there's one juicy Calci market that I need to talk to you about because this number is not good.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  Okay, what is it?

• 41:55Molly O'Shea?

  On Calci markets right now, there's an 18% chance that Trump brings back manufacturing in America. What do you think about those odds?

• 42:02Speaker 02

  I think it's the underdogs that prove everyone wrong time after time. I, uh, I think there's no greater underdog story than the story of America. I think it's how we win. I love when people doubt us because that just makes the victory all the sweeter.

• 42:15Molly O'Shea?

  Fantastic. Let's close on there.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 42:18Molly O'Shea?

  Phil, it was awesome to have you on. Can't wait to go on a site tour with you in Idaho.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  We will do it. It'll be great. Saving the West.

• 42:25Molly O'Shea?

  Saving the West. Steve, welcome to Sorcery.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me on, Molly.

• 42:31Molly O'Shea?

  We need to start off with introductions, so could you please share more on Allen Control Systems?

• 42:35Speaker 01

  We are an American defense contractor. You know, Allen is Luke Allen, my co-founder's last name. And like the old school defense firms used to name themselves like after the people who invented it, like Northrop Grumman, Jack Northrop. So I really wanted to hearken back to the old school with the name.

• 42:52Molly O'Shea?

  And so what is Allen Control Systems?

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. So we make AI machine guns that are really purposely built to neutralize drone threats. Also, they can take out other targets as well, but it's primarily meant for the drone warfare future.

• 43:05Molly O'Shea?

  We've been involved in like this really rapid increase in drone warfare. I'm really curious to get your perspective on the evolution of this and like how you even decided to go after this so severely and like what's the current state?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Well, basically what we saw is, I sold my last company to DoorDash and then right when the deal closed, Putin invaded Ukraine like pretty much like the next week. And we saw very early on that the countermeasures we were investing in as a country, like electronic warfare, or like microwave technology, I, I don't think those are going to be like long-term sustainable for some of the new drones of the future. So we saw that early and started to work on kinetic defeat solutions because you can't really armor these drones enough against a bullet. So this will be like a much more reliable system, especially as the drones start to add AI and then you can't jam them anymore.

• 43:54Molly O'Shea?

  Let's talk about the product a little bit more in depth. So as you built this out, like what are the core components that you have built into and designed your product with?

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been telling people at the show here, it's like a, this is the full stack vertically integrated gun turret company, which is a weird thing to say, but like, we do everything pretty much on this turret because it's like all the power electronics, all the PCBs, we cut all the steel, like it's like an art project of sorts because there's so many things you have to do right to hit a drone that fast, that far away with like one or two shots. So like, yeah, we, we pretty much do it all.

• 44:29Molly O'Shea?

  How did they get the car up here?

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Oh my God. My team, I feel so bad. My team had to push it.

• 44:35Molly O'Shea?

  What?

• 44:36Speaker 01

  They had to push it down these aisles and stuff.

• 44:38Molly O'Shea?

  Are you serious?

• 44:39Speaker 01

  I know, it was sad.

• 44:40Molly O'Shea?

  But you can't drive it?

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Not in here, you couldn't turn it on in here.

• 44:43Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my God.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Isn't that crazy?

• 44:44Molly O'Shea?

  Because of the fumes?

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel so bad. The team is amazing, you know.

• 44:49Molly O'Shea?

  I mean, that's a good workout.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  It's a good workout.

• 44:52Molly O'Shea?

  I mean, your, your team's full of Army Rangers now?

• 44:54Speaker 01

  It's full of a lot of really impressive people, yeah.

• 44:57Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so we are at Reindustrialize. What I was referring to is below you have a pickup truck with one of your Bullfrogs on it?

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, Bullfrog.

• 45:05Molly O'Shea?

  What is Allen Control Systems' role in reindustrialization?

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Well, there's a number of things, right? Like, obviously, there's like 250 something machine parts in Bullfrog, so that's like a lot of machining. You know, we want to prepare to like bring some jobs back, so we're like looking at, you know, doing more machining in our country. So that's like an opportunity area where, you know, we can manufacture like Alabama, like near Huntsville, and which has like obviously business effects that are good on just the business side, but then also bringing jobs back. So you get like the benefit of both.

• 45:36Molly O'Shea?

  Where is the headquarters based?

• 45:38Speaker 01

  We're Austin, Texas based for most of the engineering and design, and then we have a small DC office.

• 45:43Molly O'Shea?

  How big is the team?

• 45:44Speaker 01

  We're 52 people.

• 45:45Molly O'Shea?

  And like, as you thought about scaling out the team, like, I know talent is like a major constraint right now. Things have been delayed a bit, like US is severely lacking. So how did you go about recruiting and what's the main pull?

• 45:59Speaker 01

  I'm great at it. Like, it's easy. Who wouldn't want to work here? We're making like the greatest weapon system in American history. This is the most accurate gun already, like right now. Like, it's easy to recruit. Yeah, no problem.

• 46:12Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, that's like a super simple answer. How do you see the current state of defense tech and like where is it going?

• 46:20Speaker 01

  I feel pretty good about our product strategy. I think AI machine guns are the future of warfare. And because the robotics are getting so good now that you can actually really put bullets where you exactly want to. And bullets are very cheap. So I think like, one, I've got the best product. And I think I will for a while. Where is it going? I mean, it's going to robot on robot action. So like, these new products are so lethal that it's tough for like, people to be on the battlefield of the future. So that's where it's headed. It's not like exactly augmenting soldiers like some people's vision, but it's actually just like, no, there's going to be drones everywhere. And then there's going to be things shooting at all these drones everywhere. And it's going to become like an economic war of who can produce them the cheapest, which right now we can't.

• 47:04Molly O'Shea?

  Between the companies that we've had on through all the different industries, drones are kind of stealing the show. I mean, it's like a one to many problem. Like if you can take out a drone, like there's going to be a swarm of them. And precision warfare is only getting more intense. I'm curious, like as we evolve and transition into this world of like AI, it's creating more national security issues, problems, vulnerabilities. How do you think about AI within the product and within warfare?

• 47:35Speaker 01

  A lot of the big tech is investing in like LLMs. And so like those don't really go on a precision robot. So from like where the money is being invested in, I don't feel like I'm one release away from being put out of business. So like, it's just a much different type of AI in this type of gun. So that's, that's one thing. And, um, you know, it plays a, it plays a critical role in making the gun safer. Cause you're like, you know, you're putting in rules like for azimuth and different elevation and how much it can turn. Like where do you not want a bullet to land? Like you can draw bounding boxes. So there's a lot of like software features that I think that the AI will, quote unquote, AI, whatever you want to call it. It'll be safer. I think the, the existing system, the CROs is very good system. But I think there's a lot more features you could build to like, make it really safe. And so the software I think just helps.

• 48:20Molly O'Shea?

  AGI is like a hot topic of the day. I think like when this comes into picture, people are just like thinking that these robots are just going to control themselves. How do you push back on that?

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Those people haven't built robots before and don't know how like janky they can be sometime. You know, like we still have a long way to go in robotics to like get really, really, really awesome robots that are just doing all of our work for us. I think there's a long way to go. So I would say they shouldn't be afraid of anything.

• 48:46Molly O'Shea?

  This is more of like an investing show. So I'm really curious from your background. So like, what kind of capital are you going after, especially for?

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. These are so expensive to build, like these companies. So yeah, we raised like $43 million so far. I've never not been raising in like eight years. So yeah, we're always raising. That's the game. And yeah, these companies take a lot of capital. So we're burning hot, but.

• 49:10Molly O'Shea?

  Who are some of your investors?

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Led by Craft Ventures and then Inspired Capital, one East Coast, one West Coast, you know? Got to cover the coasts.

• 49:18Molly O'Shea?

  You're going to need someone in Austin.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  I do, I really do. It may be coming, you know, who knows?

• 49:23Molly O'Shea?

  So as we look out the next couple of years, what are you most excited about for the company and milestones?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  I think that like Bullfrog is going to be everywhere. Like every vehicle in every military that has a gun on it needs to be replaced with a gun that can hit drones. So, I mean, we're going to be in like every country. This is one of the biggest products of all time.

• 49:46Molly O'Shea?

  Andy was talking about drone warfare in terms of like one to many, because you need to take down a lot at once.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 49:54Molly O'Shea?

  How do you think about that?

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, we don't want to release numbers on drone per second killed like with the gun because like then you can reverse engineer countermeasures. But you'll see, I mean, if you come down to the range, check it out, I'll show you.

• 50:06Molly O'Shea?

  Where's the range?

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Austin.

• 50:07Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  You want to come watch it?

• 50:08Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Let's get you down there.

• 50:10Molly O'Shea?

  I need to come. Like, that sounds awesome.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  That's so much fun, too. Austin's the best.

• 50:14Molly O'Shea?

  So how are you thinking about the business in a performance-driven stance? Like, what are you looking forward to?

• 50:19Speaker 01

  So we want to hit like drones going laterally across the battlespace at top speeds, multiple with like very few shots. That's like the metric we're driving towards. I rallied the whole team around like this is what we want to see. That's the final capability to make it battlefield ready and like really start selling these everywhere. So that's what we're all rallied around right now and we're trying to like limit distractions. But, you know, it's pretty hard.

• 50:43Molly O'Shea?

  Can imagine.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Startups.

• 50:44Molly O'Shea?

  Startups.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:46Molly O'Shea?

  Well, Steve, thank you so much for coming on Sorcery.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 50:49Molly O'Shea?

  Excited for this to drop.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  It was fun.

• 50:52Molly O'Shea?

  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.