Inside Saronic’s $9.25B Autonomous Boat Factory | CEO Dino Mavrookas

Saronic Co-Founder & CEO Dino Mavrookas takes us on a tour of the company’s 420,000 sqft autonomous boat factory in Austin, Texas. This is Part I of a 3-Part Saronic dive. Sit-downs with all 4 co-founders to follow. Founded in 2022, Saronic has raised $2.6B at a last valuation of $9.25B. We walk the Corsair production line, which has capacity for 2,000 autonomous boats per year, and climb aboard Mirage, its new 52-foot vessel with 2,500+ nautical miles of range and 3,500 lbs of payload capacity. Dino breaks down Saronic’s vertically integrated hardware + software strategy, its 180-foot Marauder autonomous ship, and Port Alpha, the massive new shipyard it’s building in Brownsville, Texas. Plus: why China outbuilds the U. S. 230:1, lessons from SpaceX manufacturing, the future of autonomous warfare, and how Saronic went from testing its technology on an $800 Amazon raft to building autonomous vessels at scale. Dino Mavrookas: https://x.com/mavrookasd https://x.com/mavrookasd?s=11 Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: https://youtu.be/Z-hJOibGUo0 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Applied Aerospace http://applied-ad.com/—As global competition intensifies, strategic leadership demands space and defense technologies that deliver enduring national capabilities. At Applied Aerospace & Defense, we unleash the power of advanced manufacturing with unmatched scale and agility. Visit:https://applied-ad.com/applied-ad.com/ http://applied-ad.com/ • Zone https://zonefrontier.com/—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit:zonefrontier.com https://zonefrontier.com/ • 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. https://turing.com/sourcery • VCX https://fundrise.com/vcx—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com http://getvcx.com • Deel https://www.deel.com/sourcery—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Dino Mavrookas, Co-Founder & CEO at Saronic Technologies (00:55) Saronic's $2.6B raise (03:14) 7 Buildings, One mission (06:43) Watching Corsairs get built (09:04) How Saronic finds and trains talent (10:48) Why Saronic's boats are different (14:55) From factory floor to customer (15:48) Using autonomy in real missions (17:39) Building ships with zero room for failure (19:06) The Biggest bottleneck in autonomy testing (19:57) Saronic's newest boat (22:57) The $800 raft that started it all (26:08) From boats to building actual ships (31:48) The culture behind long hours

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

• 0:00Molly O'Shea?

  Today, an Austin-based company announced they are building a new shipyard called Port Alpha in Brownsville.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  The company's announced a $3.2 billion investment, building a next-gen shipyard.

• 0:10Molly O'Shea?

  You've raised $2.6 billion in total funding at a last valuation of $9.25 billion. And now you have an entire fleet of boats and ships being built here.

• 0:19Speaker 02

  We've announced a $392 million contract with the Navy in December of 2025. We have the capacity to build 2,000 Corsairs per year. Port Alpha will initially support 850-foot ships, and will expand up to be able to support 1,200-foot ships. These are floating cities. Now, we're going to go build the largest shipyard in the country, the most advanced shipyard in the world. We're going to bring shipbuilding back in a way that we haven't seen since World War II.

• 0:55Molly O'Shea?

  Dino, welcome to Sorcery.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Thank you, and thanks for having me.

• 0:59Molly O'Shea?

  Well, thanks for having me in Saronic's Austin, Texas HQ.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll show you around the Corsair production line in a minute, but the real crazy part is, we actually just cut over our production line to this facility about a month ago. We moved in, we have 420,000 square feet in this campus. We moved in six, seven months ago for the very, very first time, and we're already completely full, where the production line is running at full speed. We have other products that we'll show you, but it is, it is moving all out.

• 1:30Molly O'Shea?

  This is crazy. So you were founded in 2022. You've raised over, you've raised $2.6 billion in total funding at a last valuation of $9.25 billion. And now you have an entire fleet of boats and ships being built here.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  That's right. And keep in mind, too, that this is only a fraction of what we have going on. We have seven locations in the US, we have two locations internationally. Our main manufacturing hubs are Austin, Texas. For everything below, call it right around 50 feet, or our Mirage product, which we'll show you. Then we have Franklin, Louisiana, which is our second manufacturing hub. We're actually building ships. We're building Marauder, which is a 180-foot, fully autonomous ship for defense and commercial. And then we just announced Port Alpha, which is going to be the largest, most advanced shipyard, literally, anywhere in the world. We're starting on an eight, about an 800-acre footprint, just for context.

• 2:29Molly O'Shea?

  800 acres?

• 2:30Speaker 02

  800 acres.

• 2:31Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Just that footprint alone will make it the largest shipyard in the country. That's our initial phase. We have the ability to expand to over 4,000 acres of that shipyard. We're going to bring online 150,000 gross tons of capacity within a few years. That's our initial build-out. That 1.5X is the United States shipbuilding capacity right now, which sits at 100,000 gross tons. And we can take that yard all the way up to 2 million plus. So this is how you get back to scaled production of ships. And a lot of things we're doing around software and autonomy, ship design, shipyard design, will enable that. So what you're going to see here, for as awesome as it is, it's a piece of what we have going on.

• 3:14Molly O'Shea?

  And on this Austin campus, how many buildings do you have? Because we just walked over from one huge building, and it seems like that was just a lunch hall.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  That's just, we have seven buildings total.

• 3:24Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  We have two that are primarily people spaces, so think of engineers, finance, GNA. I sit in the corner, they stick me in the corner, kind of thing. Very, very collaborative workspaces, conference rooms, things like that. The space that we were just in, it's not quite a lunch hall, but it really serves as a divide between our campus, where you have the rest of the, so seven buildings total. The four buildings on this side are really all production, manufacturing, and industrial space. And that space in the middle is to bring both sides of those, the campus together, to give people a space to work together, to collaborate. Yes, grab lunch, hold all hands, do things like that. Because one of the things that we did very, very early on

• 4:09Speaker 02

  was really, really invest in this concept of vertical integration. It means you design the hardware, you build the software, but then you also build the physical things, you build the boats, you manufacture. You have a machine shop, you have your inventory. You have everything that's needed to produce at scale, and you bring all of that together as one. So while it's technically not one roof, it's one campus, and everybody works together. So if something's not working on the production floor, the hardware engineers are right there. And we just go grab them, look, this isn't working, let's redesign, and let's get back to speed.

• 4:42Molly O'Shea?

  It's crazy. So how many people are on this campus?

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Right around 1,000. We have about 1,800 people total across all of our locations. We have 300 to 400 in our shipyard in Louisiana alone. We started that shipyard about a year ago. There were 30 people there when we started the yard.

• 4:59Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty incredible. We actually acquired that yard, but it was closing down. So, closing down, the owners were laying off the workforce.

• 5:08Molly O'Shea?

  How do you get a deal on that?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Well, it was pretty fortuitous. I mean, this was a really good yard. The owners wanted to retire. The shipbuilding capacity in that yard was going to zero. We'll talk a lot about shipbuilding capacity, but we can't afford any shipyards to go to zero. And we wanted to start building very, very quickly. So we stepped in, we retained the workforce, and we pen X the workforce in Louisiana, in Franklin, Louisiana, to be specific. And then here in Texas, which is our headquarters, we have about 1,000 people. And then Port Alpha, which I mentioned earlier, that's going to be based in Brownsville, Texas. So expanding within Texas, and that site's going to create over 10,000 jobs just in the next 10 years.

• 5:49Molly O'Shea?

  That's amazing. Okay, so before we walk down this way, I'm just going to ask Brett to just show a little glance of how big this space is.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  And then, just to follow up on how big this space is, our first space, which was not even four years ago, was about 5,000 square feet. So literally, from about here to the wall, and where you see this blue tape rectangle.

• 6:16Molly O'Shea?

  It's like a standard-sized Austin house.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  That's all we had. It was, it was, it was a garage. It was, it was literally just a garage. And I remember telling 20 people in that garage in Austin, I'm like, "The future of maritime autonomy right now is dependent on what we're building right here in this garage." And now, I just remind them, I'm like, "Well, it's a much bigger garage, and we have many more people, but the future maritime autonomy is still very much dependent on what we're building right here."

• 6:43Molly O'Shea?

  Wow. Okay, so as we walk through this, what are we going to be seeing?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  So this right here is the main Corsair production line. You can see workstations, sub-assemblies, everything that flows into high-rate production. The top caps are over here, the hulls are over here, there's steps at every single workstation. So they'll complete one step, move it to the next station, and onward in this linear flow. It makes it very easy to actually spot bottlenecks in the production line. Our head of manufacturing came out of SpaceX, he was at SpaceX for 10 years, and he always talks about building the system that builds the system, but then also very quickly identifying where the system is not working.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  So when you have this linear flow, like there, you can see, there's actually no boat in that workstation. If we wanted to dive in, I would just go up to the folks working here and say, "Hey, why hasn't this boat progressed? Is there a holdup in the supply chain? Is there a part missing?" Basically, my kids can walk through this production line and identify where something isn't flowing appropriately, and then start asking questions on how do you get it back to rate? That's what our leaders are doing, the team's pushing it through the production line. And all of this is focused on rate production at scale. So in just this line we're walking down right now, we can build, we have the capacity to build 2,000 Corsairs per year.

• 8:08Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, wow.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  That doesn't even count the production line that's on that side of the, of the columns. So we could actually double that. Right now, we're using that production line for Mirage and additional products, but that gives you a sense of scale that we're talking about here. And then, as you look around, it's really just a rectangle. This is not a complicated building, it's not a really exquisite manufacturing facility. So if we needed to, and then we're talking a lot about just expanding production capacity here in the US, but also, as we talk to our allies and partners overseas, how do we quickly stand up production internationally? You know, it's a warehouse facility. And we have, because we have the system, again, the system that builds the system,

• 8:56Speaker 02

  you basically have the blueprint for everything. You have the supply chain, the processes, the work instructions, the training, and you can get up and running very quickly.

• 9:03Molly O'Shea?

  So that's a good question. In terms of building out the talent in this facility and the ones that you're expanding to, one, how do you find people? Where are you pulling them from? And then, two, with the training and the system, how does that, how do you actually train them? Like, what is the process there, and how quick do they start to run the line?

• 9:23Speaker 02

  So workforce is actually a critical reason why we selected Austin in the first place. Folks have asked us in the past, you know, "You're a maritime company, why based in a landlocked city?" And it was, it was really, I say that jokingly, but it's a good question.

• 9:39Molly O'Shea?

  It is a fair question.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  And the answer is, it all just revolves around people. It revolves around the talent that you, you see around you. And I'll kind of bifurcate the workforce into two segments, because for Corsair, a lot of the talent exists. It's very, very similar to auto manufacturing or anything else, where you're, you're just building things. And we actually can build a lot of boats in this country, smaller vessels. When you talk about workforce for shipbuilding, that's where the real bottlenecks come in. And so as we think about creating 10,000 jobs in a shipyard, right? That's where we're investing so heavily in the training, in the work instructions,

• 10:23Speaker 02

  in the processes, in the infrastructure, in the design of the actual ships themselves. How do you make the ships more simple? How do you design for that manufacturability? So that you don't have to have 15 years of experience to come and build a ship. It's, we're building ships so that we can rebuild the workforce, not saying, "Oh, the workforce doesn't exist, so we can't build this ship."

• 10:48Molly O'Shea?

  So for people who don't have full context on Saronic, which I would be very surprised if you don't at this point, many headlines, a lot of the time. Can you just share, like, what the magic is behind Saronic? What are, what is so special about these boats?

• 11:03Speaker 02

  It's a good, I get that question so often. And it's not just one thing. Like, we could talk about the hardware and how we designed the boats and how we designed for autonomy and manufacturability, which drives down costs and opens up mission capability. Uh, we can talk about the software. And the software we're building isn't like any other software for the maritime autonomy market in the world, period. It's the most advanced. It's what enables the control. It's one thing to build 2,000 boats. It's another thing to actually control 2,000 boats. And it's software and autonomy that actually enables that.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  But the thing that really makes us special is the ability to put that all together. It's not just building one or the other. It's not, okay, we could build a lot of boats. Mastercraft can build a lot of boats. It's not just building software. It's actually doing all the integrations. It's tying it all together. It's actually doing that hardware-software co-design so that you're delivering the most advanced product to the Department of War and to our allies that's actually working and actually delivering capabilities in a wartime environment. I'll use the, I'll use a Tesla analogy here for a second. And we can sit and debate if you think Teslas are the best cars or not.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  But you can't really debate if they're the best autonomous cars when compared to Ford and General Motors and other things. Like, I, I used to use an example, and it's silly. It's like, I could pull out my phone, turn on the air conditioning, open the door, call my Tesla to come pick me up. And I'm like 50/50 if I get in my Chevy Tahoe and my Apple Car, Apple CarPlay connects or not. Like, there's fundamental reasons behind that. And if you're not co-designing with that hardware-software production in mind, then things aren't going to integrate and they're not going to work. It's always going to fall down at that integration layer.

• 13:04Molly O'Shea?

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• 13:48Molly O'Shea?

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• 14:31Molly O'Shea?

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• 15:01Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:02Molly O'Shea?

  Where do these go after they're done? How does this flow?

• 15:05Speaker 02

  So, right here, you'll have the finished product. The top caps will get installed, and then they'll go out that big bay door right there.

• 15:11Molly O'Shea?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Um, and then they get shipped out to the customers.

• 15:15Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  So, we have Corsairs operational in use. We've announced a $392 million contract with the Navy in December of 2025. And then recently put out in the news Corsairs, which you just saw, were actively being used in the Straits of Hormuz. Two examples that were made public were, one, the Apache pilot rescue of two down pilots, and then a offensive attack on an Iranian port, which actually took out an Iranian submarine.

• 15:47Molly O'Shea?

  Wow. Can you explain that? Because you served in the Navy.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:53Molly O'Shea?

  How, how insane is that, that you actually don't have manned ships doing that? But you, you have autonomous ships completing missions like that?

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Well, that's what it's all about. It's about the mission, right? We talked about the software and the autonomy and the importance of it all working together. If you weren't completing missions, you're not actually giving commanders optionality. Cool boats that can drive themselves or autonomous platforms in general, boats, planes, whatever. You actually have to complete the mission. Like, what is the commander's intent? If you're not building for that, you're actually not delivering a capability. And then that commander is going to revert back to the resources that they have at their disposal, traditional assets, manned platforms, et cetera. The importance of switching to autonomy, again, to complete the mission,

• 16:45Speaker 02

  is you're actually able to complete these missions without putting people in risk, without putting people in harm's way. And that's super powerful, right? Take the Apache pilot rescue, for example. That was the first ever combat search and rescue done with an autonomous system. I can personally give you the importance of that because I lived through, I was in the Navy SEAL teams from 2004 to 2015. In 2005, there's a helicopter that was shot down while trying to rescue SEALs that were trapped behind enemy lines.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  So now to be able to perform those rescues without putting additional people in harm's way, and look, you might not always be able to do it with an autonomous system, but when you can, we absolutely should.

• 17:39Molly O'Shea?

  Mm-hmm. So, able to ensure that, what kind of redundancies do you build onto the ship or the boat? How do you ensure communication, bandwidth, all that is reaching?

• 17:51Speaker 02

  The way our engineers talk about it is always N plus one redundancy. You have to have 99.99999% confidence that the platform's going to do exactly what it says, what we say it's going to do, and what the, what the military is counting on it to do. There's absolutely no room for failure. And to do that, we just invest. We invest in testing, we invest in software. So, going back to the hardware-software interfaces, every single piece of hardware is instrumented onto this platform. So, they can tell you everything from the temperature to the oil level, to how the radios are working, to the bandwidth on the comms channel, literally everything. And all of that's important as you're heading into a mission.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  And then the testing that we invest in, we have three test sites in the US. We have, we're testing internationally now in our Australia and UK locations. And that's just at our internal test ranges. We have over 25,000 hours tested with Corsair alone. That doesn't count government test ranges and combat operations. So, it's just continuously running the platforms, iterating, and making them better at the speed of both hard, like, modern hardware and software.

• 19:06Molly O'Shea?

  What have been the biggest bottlenecks there?

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Um, time on the water, right? There's only so much that you can test in simulation, right? And that's a, that's a big way to speed up development of autonomy, right? You test stuff in simulation, you get to the 80% answer. But that you can do in faster than real time. Real time testing is by definition, real time. And so, you have to be out in the ocean. You have to be dealing with waves and saltwater and all of the different elements that the, the ocean presents. And it's, it's a challenging environment. It's a very challenging environment. I, I lived, the, the ocean breaks everything. The ocean literally breaks everything.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  So, we have to make sure that we're building extremely reliable platforms. Um, and then this is, this is Mirage. So, we can actually walk up there in a second. But it's a 52-foot version of Corsair, essentially, which Corsair's 24 feet. So, you say, okay, it's two and a half ti, two and a quarter times larger. No, it's actually 15 times larger volumetrically.

• 20:19Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, wow.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  So, what that opens up is more range, more payload capacity. So, Corsair goes 1,000 nautical miles with 1,000-pound payload capacity. This will carry 3,500 pounds with a 2,500 nautical mile range. So, it really opens up the mission set. Um, this, from basically where that, and this is our second one, actually, that we're building. We just launched the first one about a week and a half ago. That's already in sea trials, already going through the testing that we talked about. But basically, from about where we're standing back is all payload capacity. It's all just open deck space. So, I'll just, I'll let you use your imagination for what you could put on the back there.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  And then I would, I'd love to walk you up, just so you can get a sense for the, the machinery and the equipment that goes into these vessels. Because it really is quite complex. But our engineers, like, have made it. So, like, it's really hard to design something simply. It's not easy, but it's simple. And that's how you get to manufacture at scale. Um, I will ask the camera to stay down here.

• 21:27Molly O'Shea?

  He's gonna stay down here. Right, you're gonna have fun.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  But once you get up here, you can see, I mean,

• 21:33Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Massive engines, fuel tank, additional payload space in the front. So, this is what I was saying about deck and cargo space. You can see the top cap on this side.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  That is all cargo space.

• 21:47Molly O'Shea?

  That's wild. So do you have a big crane that takes us over here? Like, how do you?

• 21:51Speaker 02

  We do. So we have two, we have four, actually. Four overhead cranes that can be used to lift and mount. And then we have two mobile cranes that are around here somewhere. One, that blue one right there, and then I think the other one's around the corner. So, yeah, we have all the machinery to move these things very, very quickly.

• 22:10Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Through the production line.

• 22:12Molly O'Shea?

  And so you guys went with diesel? Did you try to do anything?

• 22:17Speaker 02

  We tried to. We went all electric. We did hybrid diesel electric. Actually, our very first product was a six-foot, all-electric mini jet ski. So when you think about it, I mean, six feet isn't, probably isn't as big as that engine right there.

• 22:32Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, that's huge. You can't see it, but it's huge.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  And what we learned from all-electric is you just don't get the range and the payload capacity that the military is looking for. So that platform actually became a great subscale demonstrator. And we iterated on that. We tested, we developed, we put it in front of the customer. And that's what actually, that iterative process is actually what led us to Corsair.

• 22:57Molly O'Shea?

  The first prototype you did, wasn't that on a raft or a dinghy or something? What was that?

• 23:03Speaker 02

  You guys are-

• 23:04Molly O'Shea?

  I was listening to this pod you did.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, you guys are the, okay, so we don't technically count that as a prototype.

• 23:11Molly O'Shea?

  Well-

• 23:11Speaker 02

  But I guess it is. It was an $800 raft that we bought on Amazon.

• 23:17Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  And it was just this plastic fishing boat. And our software engineers took $30,000 with their cameras and batteries and electronics and everything else that basically went into Spyglass, which is that six-foot mini jet ski that I was talking about. And they built out the software stack, they built out the autonomy while we were building out the hardware in parallel. And that philosophy actually is what lets us move so quickly into developing new platforms. It's why we're showing you Mirage today, why we have Marauder out in Franklin, is because a lot of our software, a lot of our autonomy translates across all of our platforms.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  So we're not rebuilding everything every single time we launch a new product. So that lets us move very, very quickly, keep making the software better and better every single day, and just launching new hardware platforms.

• 24:11Molly O'Shea?

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• 24:52Molly O'Shea?

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• 25:37Molly O'Shea?

  They'll even give you an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your investments over from another platform. If you want to build a portfolio that actually reflects your thesis, visit public.com/sorcery. Paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in the description. Founders scale faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone, anywhere. Get visas handled fast and get back to building. Visit deal.com/sorcery. That's D E E L dot com slash sorcery. Did you imagine that you were going to be building ships like Marauder? Like, did you, how did the progression start? Was it just demand and?

• 26:17Speaker 02

  It was iterative. It was iterative. If you, if you asked me four years ago if we would ever build ships, I would have said, no, you're crazy. That's why we're actually building Corsair. So you don't have to build ships, right? And the realization that we had was, why we needed Corsair was really around shipbuilding in general in the first place, right? China, we're in a shipbuilding crisis here in the US, right? China now builds us 230 to 1. Our naval fleet is actually shrinking. And we have 0.1% of global shipbuilding capacity. That's a non-existent industry. And if you understand history and what has dictated naval power, it's really just the ability to build ships.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  She goes, oh crap, we can't build ships. We need naval power. What can we build? And it turns out, we can build a lot of boats, so we started building Corsair. And so we can scale that. We can make a lot of these. We can make them very cost efficient. And we can deter the Chinese from crossing the Taiwan Strait. The other thing I want to highlight there is we actually started working on this before the very, very first USV strike happened in Ukraine.

• 27:27Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 27:28Speaker 02

  So that's a super significant moment, right? And now, looking back on it and seeing what the Ukrainians have done, it's like, okay, yeah, a lot of speedboats could be very, very effective against a much larger fleet. That wasn't really obvious when we started building. And then back to your question, I'm like, okay, so how do we even get here? Well, Corsair was extremely successful. That gave us more resources to go after even bigger problems. And as we looked at the shipping industry, it was, or the shipbuilding industry, it was a lot bigger of a problem. And in, you know, in some regards, you just can't replace gross tonnage. So while we looked at Corsair as saying, okay, like, how do we deter the Chinese fleet? There, there is demand. There is a need for the shipbuilding industry in general.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  There is a need for larger platforms, for more range, more payload capacity. And as we proved out our success, we said, yeah, you know what? We're going to go tackle that problem too. Now we're going to go build the largest shipyard in the country, the most advanced shipyard in the world. We're going to bring shipbuilding back in a way that we haven't seen since World War II.

• 28:31Molly O'Shea?

  So how big does this get? Are you going to build aircraft carriers?

• 28:37Speaker 02

  We will certainly, so Port Alpha will initially support 850-foot ships. And will expand up to be able to support 1,200-foot ships. Those are the largest ships. These are, these are floating cities. I don't know that we'll ever build a traditional aircraft carrier. I think the hybrid fleet of the Navy moving forward looks very different. And there's companies that build traditional aircraft carriers today. What we want to do is supplement that with platforms that can scale in really large numbers. And we also want to focus on commercial shipbuilding. If you go back 45 years or so,

• 29:19Speaker 02

  the very first thing that happened to the US shipbuilding industry was the removal of a commercial shipbuilding subsidy. This completely decimated the international commercial market for US ships. And with it went supply chain, workforce, and everything else. Then, 1993, and the last separate, and the decline of the government, of the Department of Defense budget happened. And everybody kind of focuses on that in the defense tech industry as well. It's kind of a watershed moment, and it certainly was. But it wasn't the first watershed moment for the shipbuilding industry. So it was that first one in 1981, followed by that second one in 1993,

• 30:01Speaker 02

  where the Navy's budget went down by 41%. That just took the shipbuilding industry, turned it upside down. If you look around, like, shipyards turned into apartment complexes. There, there's a reason why you can go and rent an apartment at a, at a place called the Naval Yard, right? All over the countries, because they actually used to be Navy yards. There used to be shipyards, and they just, they just shut down. So now we need to rebuild that infrastructure. We need to invest in infrastructure. We need to invest in net new capacity to get the shipbuilding industry back to where we need to. But not just building the same ships we've been building for the last 100 years. Really building for the future, building for autonomy.

• 30:42Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so as we walk through here, the entire facilities, I have to ask you, if you didn't have your role as CEO, which job? You can choose any of these jobs in here. Would you choose?

• 30:58Speaker 02

  I don't want to build the boats.

• 30:59Molly O'Shea?

  You don't?

• 30:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I do. I do.

• 31:01Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, you do?

• 31:01Speaker 02

  I would want to build. I'd want to be on the production line. I'll tell you, I actually, so I started my, this is 25, 30 years ago. I was actually an engineer. I was a hard, I was a computer and electrical engineer in college. 9/11 was my junior year, and that's what drove me into the military. But I actually liked building things. I wouldn't say I do it very much. And I do come down and spend time on the production line, and the team kind of walks me through a station. Very hand-holding.

• 31:32Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 31:33Speaker 02

  They're like, do this, do that.

• 31:34Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  In their heads-

• 31:36Molly O'Shea?

  Do you get too excited sometimes?

• 31:37Speaker 02

  I love it. I love it. But I know in their heads, they're thinking, please don't mess this up, because I just have to go fix it later. But it's, well, it's actually a lot of fun. I would want to be here building the boats.

• 31:47Molly O'Shea?

  That's so much fun. So do people try to stay here over the weekends?

• 31:50Speaker 02

  We do whatever it takes. People do stay here over the weekends. We work long hours. I tell the team, it's team and mission, right? How do we accomplish our mission and what does the team need to do that? And everybody's bought into that. But they're bought into the mission. They understand the importance of what we're working on, the urgency behind it. I mean, Corsairs are being used in the combat environment right now.

• 32:14Molly O'Shea?

  It's crazy, yeah.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Like, that's our customer. That's who we're delivering for. That's, that's not a nine to five.

• 32:22Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, it's a big, big deal. Okay, so as we wrap up this portion, we're going to go head into some sit downs with your other three co-founders. And if you haven't watched it yet, check out all those interviews. Thank you.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 32:37Molly 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.