#37 - Cameron Schiller, Co-Founder & CEO of Rangeview

35:49No, and the regulatory things. Oh my God, getting it. It really just like do it and ask questions later. And I was like, wow, this is like a big deal. Yeah. But I used that to fund that company. Anyways, that company got me to China. And in China, the infrastructure was just such a huge deal. And we're totally missing that layer in America. Like as an example, equipment. the equipment manufacturing market for you know choose your manufacturing technique like the most popular one right now is CNC machining it's like there aren't that many American CNC machining companies is there like any major one there's Haas okay the Haas gets all their castings in China right and a lot of other parts in China as well is it really American if it's all based like kind of built in China let me put it this way like if if if China was like for some reason I don't want America to like have CNC machines I think it'd be a very big problem for right for teams so you know you get a lot of them from Europe and so forth but it's really tricky because the money doesn't stay here this is like a story that I was told in in automation like when I was in that industry doing robots and people were scared about robots taking jobs There's an interesting story here.

37:13The first one is robots have already won. They're just in data centers for space and efficiency reasons. And the best roboticist is a computer programmer. And a whole bunch of people worked really hard to give a computer programmer a ton of leverage. They command a legion of people at their fingertips. The problem is they can only do information theory. And information gets stale in society over time. The optimizations that you can make to like, I want a burger. Burger shows up at my door. Or, you know, all the other bits that you can do with this amazing robotic system that we build. Communicate with other people, all this stuff, right?

37:49So, robots are already here. And that's, like, the first thing I always tell people. Second is, in automation, like, it won't take your job. Trademark. Asterix. It's like the robotics industry always says robots won't take your job because everyone's freaking out. People are freaking out. Or like, you're literally going to take my job. The truth is, I kind of somewhere in the middle where if you look at a farmer, right? Like, yes, there are not thousands of people doing farm work and we have abundance. And one farmer is doing the work of a whole bunch of people with this amazing robot that we call a tractor.

38:29And like, no, everyone didn't like lose their job in the long run. But probably there are a few years where people did this transition. so so long as we can get those people retasked to kind of the new loop that has been created with improved technology we're safe if we can't because education isn't in place or the new technology does not have a you know call it like a skill range that is enveloped by the people that displaced, you have unemployment. But the biggest thing is, if those farms and tractors aren't in America anymore, you replaced everyone's job. It's all gone. This is what globalization was.

39:15It's all gone. We didn't just make the farm more efficient. We just sent it to China. Chinese olives, Chinese apples. Your American burger was made in China. Sorry, well, it was assembled in Carl's Jr., so it's all American. It actually might have been assembled, maybe cooked in China. So this is my problem. This is my core problem with all these factories. It's like, yes, it's a highly automated factory. Like, where are those robots going from? Where is the cash that you're putting into the factory? Where is it going? Is it leaving the country? That sucks. Well, isn't another problem that, like, in your case, you're targeting a market or a few markets that are like extremely valuable how many valuable markets are there in manufacturing right mama mia manufacturing is a bigger percentage of americans of america's gdp than all of tech combined tech is like 1.4 trillion tech is only 1.4 trillion dollars what are they saying tech is and manufacturing is 2.9 apple's doing tech The American tech sector was worthy of a roughly 1.6 trillion in accounting for nearly 2 trillion of US dollars in the country's GDP.

40:36In this year? Like last year? Yeah. The point is, in America, the manufacturing sector is... It's like a massive opportunity. It's insane. And I think for folks looking, at least from the VC side, at this new opportunity, if they see manufacturing startup A and B, and they might kind of be competitive because they think it's all like fintech or like crypto you're just one person wins the other guy loses just another segment right yeah and the truth is like no like it is bigger than the entire world that like you have optimized in before inside of technology right like an injection molding startup and a machining startup are just as similar as a fintech startup and a healthcare startup like yes they're both startups but they are not competitive right like so so so what defines something in a market is its is its production capabilities there's no such thing as a manufacturing technology that can do it all like there's actually no such thing as a manufacturing technology which can like generalize a bunch of specific things that have happened is a very good way to know if someone's like not done enough manufacturing if they're like yeah i'm gonna build the machine they'll like delete all of these hyper specific you know forms of manufacturing and the reason why i say that is because if you look over time we've just created more manufacturing technologies we just created more and they're more specific and they're better at doing these very very very tightly zoned types of parts in manufacturing the way the world works is a designer chooses the cheapest way to achieve his part specifications sometimes if he's smart he'll design to a known process that's cheap so the specifications make the part and the whole thing cheaper this is a design for manufacturability yeah this is like what that world is but this means that you really compete from an efficiency which ultimately is a cost basis with things are like honed to very specific things like we have created entire industries on how to effectively make screws right if someone says like i'm gonna metal 3d print a screw because i can make all the different screw sizes and types it's like for the price of you know that printer i could fill this room with every single shape and size of the screw that exists times a thousand it's it's it's unbelievable just how these things scale over time right like like manufacturing is is a it's a very interesting world and specificity like often also often wins um and that's okay and that's that's a huge market oftentimes like manufacturing is a massive pie slice there's a there's a lot to there's a lot to improve here the thing that i would like is not American firms competing with American firms, but American firms competing with Chinese firms or some overseas firms.

43:48This is what we need to do. If technology and automation and labor decoupling is the path forward, then it actually doesn't matter where it is. It doesn't have to be in a place with cheap labor. It has to be in a place with good infrastructure and a place that wants to get all the money associated with putting those factories in. So I advocate both those things should be in America. But this means that we have to compete fairly with China. And today we do not compete fairly with China. China subsidizes parts, takes the most advanced manufacturing technology in America for making metal parts. China can make that part for cheaper than that American firm can get electricity and the raw goods.

44:27So is this one of those things where you just have to go to D.C. to basically talk with the U.S. government to make it reasonably fair or competitive against what? That's not something I can do. I think it's something that has to become a national priority. I think that will happen in two ways. The first is something crazy happens, and we need to do this immediately. And I think the second one is if the country decides that they want to be very serious about bringing back manufacturing jobs. Yeah. But even if the prior one or whatever the first one happens, it's not something that can be turned on overnight.

45:09Right? Like the tribal knowledge doesn't exist. The two big problems are workforce and equipment lead times. so workforce the tribal knowledge doesn't exist but technology can solve transcripting it into sensors and logic so you know you go to the people who know how to make it today and the apprentices that are learning how to make things you package all of that it's doable You can package all of that into a computer that says, I've seen this before. Here's how to perform this operation. And if you're good enough, you can actualize the equipment to do the operation directly with the oversight of a human.

46:00And this argument is being made by a few manufacturing startups. That's a pretty good argument. The second problem is equipment lead times. This is critical. you you can't just double the size of a of a factory the overnight the like lead times that we deal with in our world are over 16 months for critical pieces of componentry you could have the whole factory built and not have this one piece of equipment and it you can't do anything well harris talked about like the stamping press that they built for like 200k was i think it was going to be like a 16 or 18 monthly lead time yep and like two million dollars yep sounds about right yeah and probably not from america no yeah i assume yeah yeah some of them are and those american firms are fantastic but they're just as tech forward as the factories that they served before so the highest tech equipment and in the highest tech and quickest lead time equipment you can get in america right now is of course from where they're building all the factories every day which is china so the highest performance manufacturing equipment you can get it's it's all in china so if there was like if you could wave a magic wand yeah and rapidly or like change the focus of a whole bunch of people in the u.s today towards one thing what would that be yeah if i if i could wave a magic wand i'd have a lot more people making a lot more parts like just making stuff yeah pipes boxes hangers i-beams like all the stuff you see around you today i mean look in the room that you're around right now like what percentage of that room was made by people in your community do you actually know for this this building we're in a building from the 60s man this whole place is American as hell.

48:04We're sitting around America, man. You can feel it in the air. You go to like a modern apartment and it's like, it's over. Like there's nothing, literally nothing that you can put your life on the line on and say that was made in America. China's living our American dream. And with it, the personal responsibility. What? Yeah. How are we going to build stuff? You know? Like this is, this is a core problem and I wanted to go work on Starship and like one of the guys that were running manufacturing at the time chatted with us about it. And once Starship is designed and ready to go, the problem of making 1 ,000 of those things is unbelievable.

48:45SpaceX had it so bad that they built their own foundry. They're a rocket company that had to build their own foundry. That's ridiculous. You know, a Chinese rocket maker doesn't have to like go make his own bolt manufacturer and is like SpaceX has to do all of their own stuff because the country isn't supporting them so if you're not Elon Musk like how are you gonna build it man you're basically down bad you have to do this for all of the other people who want to make something in this country right like let's bring machine chops back to around every corner right let's but you can't you can't just do that with technology there's no like AI robotics magic wand that's like we're just gonna do you know process better using AI like what happened we're gonna use Devon chat GBT but for factories exactly it's like that and that that won't happen for a whole bunch of reasons it like in part because AI works really well on huge data sets and on information theory it's gonna like AI is really good in the worlds that it understands well.

49:57And those worlds have a lot of data, right? Like if you go tell an AI to anodize parts, the active anodizing parts, right? You like take this metal part, you like put it in acid bath, another bath out the door. Like you got to say, you know, 100 % of the value of ChatGPT is giving you information. very little percentage of the value of anodizing parts is giving you information. Look at you giving me like schedule it a little bit better and they like figure out how much it costs. But mostly it's just putting it from bath to bath. There's like the bathing. This is where figure comes in. We're going to use figure.

50:47That's right. You give it to a humanoid and the humanoid flaps his wings and flies away with the anodization baths. you spend three years and i know that you when we talked last time you were like grinding you'd go to school you'd get home and then you like grind in the garage or whatever for three four hours yep something like that yep and you did that for three years yep yes so in high school yeah robotics was was super serious i mean we did we did vex and first robotics which are two fantastic robotics programs in america and they taught you quick iteration they taught you first principles building building stuff with your hands and we would work in the garage for I mean I think it's a great American builder story it's like a bunch of you know a bunch of wrenches in a garage and into 2 a.m.

51:423m every night building building robots and it's super competitive when you look at the next generation of builders that are coming out of the world right now look no further than than some of these robotics education programs so you have america with first and vex robotics and battle bots later into great engineers and in china you have dji robomasters which is sponsored by the you know state and is run by dji and they put very talented engineers on a pedestal i mean you're a quarterback in china if you can build a fantastic robot and that's been happening for years you can go look at dji robomasters on on youtube and what it does is it aligns people with the problems of the country, which is making stuff that matters.

52:42And China's set up to make stuff that matters. I mean, the people are, you know, they're being celebrated for building fantastic robots sponsored by the state, like all the way from what's being built today to the next generation of people that are being built tomorrow. It's all queued up. So I think it's going to be really challenging for America in the next few years. And we should invest a lot into education today. So let's talk about this new facility. Massive place. How big is it relative to your old place? This is 15 times larger. So we will be expanding our production capacity by 15 times.

53:24And the last facility was to prove our novel technology in qualification against production contracts. And this facility is to scale against those production contracts. So we're looking at multiple decade-long production contracts that are each worth tens of millions of dollars for the purpose of deploying American steel in American engines and structurals on this land. And what's so special about this facility is that it was a huge part of the space shuttle program, the Titan IV rocket program. So the heritage is here. Everything around here is all American. and it's kind of a place where you can feel it in the air.

54:07It's super special and we're lucky to call it home. It's much bigger. You're already like three X over using the other one, so it's really only like five X what you heard. It's packed. Yeah, it's pretty bad. We're packed. But I know it's a little bit of a fixer upper. What is the, like been the retrofit job from the shuttle program to now? Yeah, it's been incredible. What needs to be done? And I mean, it's part of what we're showing, which is that you can take American industrial assets that have been forgotten and convert them into the next generation of American manufacturing greatness. So it's a full retrofit, right?

54:44It's environmental controls. It's making it a place that people want to work in. Half the problem with manufacturing is people just don't want to work in factories. They are inspiring places. So this is going to be an incredibly inspiring place to work. and it will be configured for all of the, you know, novel processes that we operate. We operate lithography in Haas. We literally use light to shape sand. You can't do that in, you know, a traditional old facility. You have to have clean rooms and all that. So that's all being retrofitted inside of here in a really modern way. So from working on robotics for like three years during high school, is there anything that you kind of carried through those years to what you're doing at Rangeview right now?

55:27yeah yeah i mean a ton of stuff the way that you think about a robot is so different like most people think about robot arms and humanoids all the stuff we keep talking about the truth is like one of the best robots in the in the world in the physical world today is a dishwasher dishwashers are all over the place and they're not that expensive someone figured out that you can like make a black box where a human does the edge cases and the rest of the system figures itself out. But if we tried to wash dishes the way that we're building robotic solutions for industry today, it would be two robot arms and a camera system, and you'd snap a plate and pay itself back never in 100 years.

56:13So we have to rethink from first principles what it means to automate something and put the humans in the most expensive problems. The problems are changing every time, you're losing index, all this stuff. So a factory is a bunch of operations in series that are measured in their efficiency, which ultimately creates the price of a part. And so there's tons of automation opportunities. And you have to be really smart about what type of automation you put somewhere. So our factories don't have a lot of robot arms everywhere. Robot arms are kind of, they kind of exist if you look at a robot arm. it's you know one's shaped the way your arm is they have all the joints in the same place and everything because they're designed to work within human environments they're designed to replace a human worker um and this is your like big gripe with like the humanoids in general it's not that we shouldn't have way way more robots doing a whole bunch of stuff it's just the fact that like this one form factor doesn't make sense for most applications yeah i mean say that um Like it's all going to come down to efficiencies.

57:19If AGI gets there and humanoids are fantastic at stuff, the cost function won't support generalized robotics. It's just going to be more efficient to have robots, which are going to be 100 to 1 ,000 times cheaper, doing very specialized tasks. If you've got to move a block from point A to point B as fast as possible, it turns out that a conveyor belt is a lot, yes, less general, but a lot cheaper and a lot higher throughput than a humanoid. And so kind of at the limit, you're not going to have these generalized solutions doing everything. You're going to have this breakover between specialized and general solutions.

58:03And for the vast majority of things that happen, specialized solutions will win. So our factory is a very special set of inputs and outputs that allows us to be very efficient. But it is coming from a narrow band of production, right? We produce parts within a certain size. We produce parts within a certain alloy class. If you want stuff outside of that, you can go other places. but we're going to be world-class in making stuff within our box. How do you decide which box to put yourself in? You do a market analysis and a technology analysis. So you work to understand the constraints of the technology.

58:45Each technological limit will be set by some improvement curve, and the improvement curve will kind of look like a square root of X, where it trails off. Initial improvements are cheap. Tail-end improvements are expensive. And then markets will just be kind of like, what value does stuff bring to humans in the world, right? making trinkets like forks aren't really that useful they're worth a few cents or dollars and then making you know blades for an engine that produces power for an entire neighborhood tend to be worth a lot so you overlap those two worlds and identify what capability set is both cheapest to build and most valuable to the world yeah well i would actually like to spend a little bit of time on your design philosophy because the other office like it's beautiful and it's a great space to be in yep and not only that when i wear like your merch people every single time people are mentioning it really commenting on every single time when i wore the uh the fighter jet thing the ace yeah a hundred percent at least once when i would wear it and I wore it like 20 times.

1:00:00Powerful. It was very interesting. So what's kind of like your design philosophy for creating beautiful spaces? I like design. I'm a creative person, and I think it matters. Design matters. It's subconscious, I think, for most technical folks, but people like the Disney Imagineering Group are world-class at engineering emotions, and I think a lot of stuff is downstream of emotions. It's like one of the philosophies I have. So, you know, if you can improve the efficiency of your, you know, your team by 1%, like that's worth so much to the business and a few plants here and there. And, you know, it really depends what level of good design.

1:00:45You can go hire a, you know, interior designer to make a place look professional, but it's... It doesn't feel emotional. It doesn't elicit. I really like beautiful spaces. And beautiful spaces aren't designed by some algorithm. It's a feeling that someone has, and it's like a real labor of love to make that happen. There's a bit of a person inside of what you see there. And there's some really remarkable places that you go to and you just feel it. and it's going to be critical that the next manufacturing buildings inside America aren't old and look like they're going to eat you apart with rust in Texas.

1:01:29Yeah, they need to be inspiring. They need to look like meccas. They need to look like what they are, which is the future for society. Have you ever played Factorio? Yes, I love Factorio. Did you? I actually play real-life Factorio. Well, that's what I was thinking. I play real-life Factorio. have you played actual factorial of course how much how many hours do you have in factorial not nearly as much as as thomas really there's a guy on our team thomas thomas is like he two screens factorial one screen is the game the other screen is his excel calculator for the ideal throughputs free blueprints for every assembly like in the forms for doing all the like super high performance level factorial like nth optimization stuff it's a it's a great video game i mean did you how to build a factory it's like fantastic quick iteration loop you know yeah it's good so i know that you mentioned a while ago that basically you could look or you could understand a society through their cars yeah like through history and stuff tell me about that yeah uh actually great question it's something i haven't been asked i think publicly before i like cars a lot um i've always liked cars iron cars are really hard to build like you mentioned this earlier in the in the podcast it's like there were a lot of people building cars and cars have gotten increasingly complex over time their electrical mechanical systems they're um they're very hard to finance they're there's a lot of politics associated with with making them with emissions now and so forth um they're really you know other than planes and things like they're some of the hardest things, maybe even harder in some cases than planes because of the order quantities.

1:03:12You just have to make so much of one thing. And a car for many people is a very big purchase decision for people early in life. It's one of the biggest purchase decisions that they make. So they're making a compromise between a whole bunch of things. And you can generally tell a lot about a person, if they care about cars, by what car they choose to care about. If they don't care about cars, then it's not really an indicator. But I generally like to think that's the case. And at a higher societal level, you can see this over time, like what people care about. As the oil embargoes came in in shortages years ago, you'll see preferences for gas guzzling or not so gas guzzling because in america you had that like mustang when the mustang came out it's a huge deal and all this stuff is designed for kind of the state of the time so you can look at some of the most there and it's not all cars there's like a certain subset of cars which really tell stories they're generally made by really passionate groups of small people inside of the company those are really special cars you want to talk about specific cars in your mind that kind of fit that criteria yeah uh from manufacturing standpoint the moment the f-150 went from steel to aluminum it was a huge deal um bmw when they went carbon fiber like directional weave carbon fiber on the whole chassis they took the boeing 787 team the dodge viper was a really big deal dodge was trying to prove itself in the world that it wasn't you know is more than a minivan maker.

1:04:59Although at the time, the minivan was also like a very innovative thing that came out. It's weird to say, like the caravans, everything before it. So Dodge put together a parts bin car. Like literally the turn signals are off of, you know, this and that. And it was a truck engine that they added two cylinders to. And Bob Lutz was the guy that did it. And what he did was like he worked super hard on this very difficult problem to prove that that company and those people were worth something in the world. And this has happened kind of across time. I mean, Lotus as a company has done remarkable stuff.

1:05:36But it's not even just one brand, right? It's very specific moments in time and people working on specific projects and cars inside of those moments. And it's a really cool interest because people, you can connect over cars. and people love them for all different reasons, right? They can be beautiful. You can take care of them a lot for people that want to do that. You can race them and not care about the paint at all. You work on them yourself. It's a big canvas for people's interests that are really passionate about things. And that's something that I personally love. I love when people are really passionate about stuff.

1:06:13What have your car choices been since you were a teenager? I said about you. Yeah, that I like GTIs. I think the Volkswagen GTI is like one of the best cars. Anytime someone asks for a car before they even tell me what they care about, the GTI is the answer. It's the perfect people's car. What makes it so special? It's perfect.

1:06:40The seating position is great. It's got fantastic chassis dynamics. it is front-wheel drive but it's not that bad a lot of car people will say they want you know rear-wheel drive and they just truly haven't driven a great front-wheel drive car before um it's simple a lot of the kind of older ones i'm thinking like pre-2017 gtis and it's super practical it's got a ton of space in it it's got all the stuff you could you could want in a car but the backseat of a gti is like a far more comfortable place to be in than you know like the backseat of some of these SUVs that America is so attached to right now.

1:07:19The SUV craze in America, just to give a little tangent, is awful. It's ruining the country. We need to go back to wagons, wagon superiority. The wagon, oh, my God, Europe's got it right. Really? Manual wagons. You're saying Europe is mogging America? Yeah, 100 % on cars. Why?

1:07:40It's like a very ego-driven thing in America. You have to sit up high. you know so you have all these people driving like g wagons and and these other really sit up high type situations you don't really need to well these suvs have like similar interior space which is an argument people make all the time for big cars similar interior space to like lower sitting cars that have like gti has got a ton of interior space and it's a small car it's just the you lift it up a lot you drop the the the roof line a lot and you end up cutting a lot of usable space inside all these cars so it's kind of an ego driven thing sometimes um yeah the gti is a great recommendation i normally tell everybody like that is that's the thing and then beyond that if you want to get more specific you know you can ask people like what exactly are you looking for what's the relationship you're looking to have with your car the thing for me is i like the way cars drive like a i'm a always like mechanical engineering and car is one of the most like complex mechanical things that you're going to work with and spend time with every day so if you care to feel it you can totally do that like you can understand how the tires are releasing as you go around a turn or you know how the gears are shifting you just have to pay attention and you end up really caring a lot about how mechanical systems work because you can have that relationship with a with a car a lot of people at at range of your car people in fact we have a we have a car lift going in in our employee lounge so you can like in this new building yeah like literally right there okay yeah there's literally gonna be a car lift so people can work on their car share insane yeah that's very best is it do you uh you don't have any hiring policies that where you're you're discriminating against people without good card days right no no of course not okay all right let's end it on uh what's the hardest thing you've overcome I was very uncertain about dropping out of college.

1:09:36It was a big pipeline. And I was on track to going to good schools and getting a good certain path to a good job. And it felt like there was something wrong with that path for me. I think the state of college is changing in America quite rapidly. And I felt the beginning of that. And I had much higher ambitions for the impact that I would have on the world. And had those ambitions with a focus on doing it soon. I was urgently trying to do something that mattered in the world. I felt like that wasn't happening at college. At the same time, it was all lined up. It's like, if you just do these things, you'll be fine.

1:10:34I think there's no better time to drop out of college if you know that what you want to do is more likely to be taught to you outside of school than inside of school. I don't think that's the case for everything. but

1:10:52it ended up being harder for me than I thought but after doing it and connecting with a bunch of other folks living a similar life to me I felt significantly less lonely in the decision that I made and I think it was maybe the initial loneliness that was difficult for me to experience It's feeling like you've made the correct decision for yourself, but the world disagrees with you is not a comfortable feeling. How much did you work out during that time? It's interesting that you say that. It was one of the biggest things that kept me together, I think, is two to three hours in the gym every day.

1:11:39It's very, very, very hardcore. Eating extremely well in a gym. There's a lot of clarity and thought. And since then, starting the company has not been helpful for my gym regiment. I think I'm doing probably half that. But it was a really big deal. I think going to the gym is a really, really big deal for me and a lot of my other founder friends. Don't like help you survive a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.