Full Anduril R&D Tour: Matt Grimm, Co-Founder & COO

0:00All of those functions report into me and I oversee and drive all of that. Kind of the guts that makes things happen. You make it happen. That's my job.

0:11It's a very enclosed chamber where you're not getting waves in or out. Here's my favorite. But this one, this one's pretty fun too. Do you feel like you're driving a very expensive forward deployed AI compute node? I do. For a distributed command and control of a AI enabled battlefield? I feel like I'm about to go save America. That's what I feel. There you go. There you go. You want to play the national anthem or anything here? This is what we have here? Yeah, yeah, this is Venice. But Fury is your favorite? My personal favorite. Why?

0:49Welcome to Sorcery. Perfect. Macaro? Yes. Thanks for having me here. Where are we? Thanks for having me. We are here at Andrell's headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, in Orange County, just south of L.A. We are here in what we call our Building A. This is our Research and Development building. It's a 200 ,000 square foot building, 50 foot clear high ceilings here, right across the parking lot from our engineering and design hub here. So the whole idea with this building is we have a machine shop, we have a composites lab, we have a metrology lab, we have a development test lab. All of these different environments where we can prototype things quickly, test them quickly, find the fractures, find where they break, find what parts of it wear down.

1:30and then ultimately use that to drive our iterative R &D process to get products built and shipped faster. And what are we standing in front of right now? We are standing in front of, this is our XLUUV. In Australia, these are called ghost sharks. Here in America, they're just called the XLUUV. This is a fully robotic submarine. So no humans on board, no people remote controlling, fully autonomous. So you give it a mission, you program some waypoints, you program a mission set of what it's supposed to look for, where it's supposed to drop payloads, when it's supposed to surface, and you send it out on its way and it goes and performs its mission completely autonomously.

2:07So these are designed at our office in Sydney, Australia, which I had the pleasure of setting up a couple of years ago when we first launched this program. And now they're currently being manufactured in our Sydney manufacturing facility that just opened. It's about 75 ,000 square feet and is capable of making dozens of these a year and we'll be expanding production for them to our new facility in Quonset, Rhode Island where we'll be making both our dive LDs, our smaller submarines, and these big guys for the U.S. market. Rhode Island is the heart of submarines. It is. It's great. It is. A lot of submarines, a lot of navy, a lot of water.

2:43So we have a new facility just in Quonset kind of on the west side of the of the of the bay there. So all of these are gorgeous. It's a big achievement. No, congrats. But I can't imagine Anderil has always been this clean. No. So can you just talk through like the timeline and like what the process was like and the evolution of Anderil from scrappy startup to gorgeous ghost shark manufacturer. I still think of us as scrappy startup, but I appreciate the question. I understand where you're coming from. So we're about eight and a half years old now. So we were founded in early 2017. And our first office was a 5 ,000 square foot.

3:22I think it was 4 ,900 something, just under 5 ,000 square foot garage that used to be American Airlines storage facility for lost luggage. So if you flew to John Wayne Airport and you lost your bag, American Airlines would store it in this garage and just leave it there until someone claimed it or whatever. So it had mold on the walls. It had no bathroom. We had to put our own bathroom in. It had no air conditioning. It had no ventilation. It was just a storage shed that was where we got started. So we started on our first day with 10 employees, just the five co-founders of us and our first five employees, and just had a couple ideas.

4:01There's a famous picture of us brainstorming ideas of what to work on with just a bunch of ideas on the whiteboard. And that's what led to originally the Sentry Tower for border security deployments and then kind of expanded from there. So from there, we then kind of expanded within Costa Mesa. We opened our D.C. office not that long after and have been kind of off to the races since then. So we're now just about 7 ,000 employees, got about 34, 35 offices around the world. Depends how you count a little bit of different buildings on the same campus. But thereabouts, and are really off to the races scaling, especially on the production side, as we land some of these larger contracts and ramping the full-scale production and getting out of just the early R &D type of phase.

4:38How do you manage all of this globally? I don't sleep a lot. And then it's a pithy point. people kind of bring this up all the time but like it really comes down to hiring the absolute best people you can find and finding for us that means folks who are entrepreneurial folks who are incredibly mission driven folks who are kind of like uh go get them sort of like can do type attitudes and the question when we take on big programs like this and uh i'll backtrack in a minute to talk about how the program came together the question is never like what can go wrong the question is always like okay how do we make it go go right there's just a mindset difference between a negative worldview of just like, oh, this will never work.

5:20Here's 10 reasons why not to like, oh, maybe we could make it work. What would it take? Well, it would take an innovative chief engineer. It would take an innovative operations person. It'd take an innovative production scaling person. We need a team that looks like this. How can we find those folks? So finding people who we can build the company around to have that sort of positive worldview, very ambitious, full of ideas, full of kind of that mission drive, that's really what drives Anderil at its core. And I know it sounds like some sort of cheesy business school thing you see like embroidered on a pillow or something, but it's like people really do drive the culture.

5:54So for us in leadership, it's about trying to find those folks, putting them in the right role, giving them kind of the right swim lanes, and then letting them run and build their teams and the growth is working. So we have the opportunity to interview all the founders today. Yep, one of the few days we're all together. So this is what's great. It's fantastic, it's a miracle they would say, but what role does each one of you have, especially now at this scale? Yes. So you should ask that question to the four individually. Okay. Because it'll be phenomenally interesting to see where we agree and where we don't.

6:28So a few ideas here. So first is that Palmer is our founder, and he is the guy who has really a lot of the innovative drive behind what drives us as a company. So new product ideas, new kind of, what is in the business is called con ops. It means like, how will they use this product? How does it fit into the current frame of what warfighters are using? He's the guy who kind of comes up with a lot of these new ideas and this kind of new idea generation. He's also something of our, like, wouldn't figurehead's the wrong word. I would call him more of our, like, public persona. Like, he's out there most on podcasts and media doing interviews, including over the weekend at RNDF.

7:05He did a Fox News. Like, he's mostly, like, our pretty vocal spokesperson who's out there. Trey obviously leads our investor relations and he brings a tremendous amount of expertise there. And then this doesn't get appreciated in public enough, but he also runs our marketing and our design teams internally. So he has that kind of drive behind our partnership with Ohio State or our NASCAR partnership or a lot of the design aesthetic that you'll see in our logos and our swag and whatnot. A lot of that comes from Trey. Brian is really our like I would call him like our strategic genius so he is the one who is looking at with Palmer has an idea for a new product or any of our engineers really have an idea for a new product he's the one who kind of sees the chessboard the best on what the existing programs are what programs the Navy or the Air Force or what the British Army is going to want or what the Australians are talking about or what the Japanese military is but he's the one who kind of sees the global chessboard of the different competing programs and competing companies in the space.

8:07There's a lot of companies who work in the defense sector and he sort of sees where Andrel plays into that and how we fit and he plays that game extremely, extremely well. He's obviously our CEO, so ultimately we all report into him and he's the big boss and decider at the end of the day when there are conflicts and things we have to resolve. And then my part, as I said, I like to joke that I'm the chief janitor, a lot of the operational problems flow to me. So if that's facilities, if that's HR, if that's IT, information security, physical security, like dealing with security clearances and all that's really tricky and nuanced at our scale.

8:40But more important than all that, our supply chain, our production, our fielding, our sustainment, our maintenance plans, our logistics, like moving things like this around the world is very complicated, very tricky. All of those functions report into me and I kind of oversee and drive all of that. So kind of the gut so that makes things happen. It is admittedly less interesting and less compelling than like, how do we sell a program to the British Navy? But it nonetheless kind of makes the company run in the background. You make it happen. That's my job. This is an anechoic chamber. So a number of our products use all sorts of interesting radars and different communication standards.

9:19So like different antennas, different chips, all of that. And then a lot of our products get into electronic warfare. So things like jamming and spoofing. So you could imagine a world like sending conflicting guidance signals to an enemy drone so you can convince it to move off target or doing kind of radio jamming so that you can't communicate with your drones. And that causes all sorts of problems for the enemy drones. The question is how you test that because we're, I don't know what airport you flew into, but we're right next to John Wayne, about three miles that way. So you cannot go out on the roof and just like broadcast a big signal that jams communications protocol.

9:56for obvious reasons, very illegal. So then where do you test that? Is you test that in big chambers like this where radio waves signals just can't escape. It's like a Faraday cage. Exactly, got it. Yeah, so you can test a bunch of that stuff and it's a very enclosed chamber where you're not getting waves in or out. So you get clean environment for kind of writing that code. So it's your meditation room? That is very, very quiet. It is very quiet. And the joke is if you were in there and something bad happens, no one can hear you scream. So, you know. It's the meditation room. Exactly. Exactly.

10:25So in here we have our metrology lab. Metrology is a fancy term for very precise measuring of things. So when an engineer designs a part and says that we need to have this hole at exactly this location, is it exactly that location or is it slightly off? Like what is that tolerance with which it's okay to have parts off? If you've ever tried to assemble an Ikea dresser and sometimes the holes don't quite line up, sometimes it's not a big deal. You can just like, thwack it with a hammer and it works. But if you're talking about a big aircraft or a submarine, like, those holes need to line up exactly.

10:57So in the business, that's called tolerance and tolerance stacking. And then you need to measure all of the parts that you're making, certainly in those early phases of R &D, to make sure that the parts you're designing are compliant with the design standards. So here in our metrology lab, these guys are using different kind of state-of-the-art scanners, where he's scanning the part and then looking at exactly the measurements of it and then that turns into an analysis on whether this this part with these grooves is exactly within tolerance of what the engineer specified it to be. So they have a whole bunch of different kind of techniques for that.

11:34They've got some very precise measuring arms that can measure with incredible precision. I will get the precision wrong if I don't if I don't ask my expert over here. So you know that if this part is designed to a certain spec or a certain tolerance that the parts are within it. But it's a fairly standard lab in the grand scheme of things for engineering companies, but nonetheless makes for very cool content. And some of these are pretty new, innovative techniques using weird computer vision and triangulation techniques. This one's a pretty old standard technique using a precise robot arm. But they have pretty cool music using a camera here with different lasers to measure exactly the part and then turning it into a 3D model.

12:10So you can imagine on one hand, the engineers over there have a 3D model that they're designing. Then they send it to get made. It gets made and then it comes back and says, okay, did that manufacturing technique work? Like we wanted it to be cast or we wanted it to be 3D printed or we wanted it to be machined out of metal. Was it precise enough? Was it within spec? So then you take the physical part and do the inverse where you measure it, make a 3D model and then kind of compare the two. Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30 ,000 companies, including one in three venture-backed startups in the U.S.

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14:09Spelt S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. That's Turing.com slash sorcery. She just asked me what all the four founders did, and it was awkward. I couldn't come up with anything for you. We're just going to... We're going to dub it in later. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. This is bad, Tracy. Cut this in half. Okay. Where should I go? Over there? Machine shop that way, back to the left. It's very important. Pencil's here, you know. I told you the nonsense rolls up to me. So this is what we call our dev test area. The dev test area here is an area that is meant to break things. It's the blunt version of it. So these guys work on figuring out all sorts of ways to break our products.

14:51So whether that's spraying it with salt water, as in the case of our little chamber over here. I don't know how much you've spent time on boats, but salt water eats everything. Everything. It eats water. It eats cables. It eats metal. It eats plastic. It eats leather, it eats rubber, it eats everything. So when our products get deployed either on coastal environments or on boats or in the water, in the case of submarines, you obviously need to work on a lot of that resiliency. So it's one of the test chambers they use for that. Drop testing, overvoltage, undervoltage, like all sorts of different, part of what we use the anechoic chamber for is different kind of resiliency to jamming techniques and all of that.

15:33But in our lab in here, we've got test ovens, test chambers. So if you wanted to bake a product, freeze a product, low humidity, high humidity, run it through cycles like that, this is where you do that. We have our vibroom over here. So if you wanted to take our product and then shake it and see if connectors come out, see if the different motion kind of causes things to fracture over time. Vibe table's in here. and then in our corner or back over there, you can kind of see we take a couple steps forward, our battery chargers and dischargers. So if you want to cycle the battery over and over and over again, get up to high charge, low charge, high charge, low charge at different kind of power settings and really kind of drive the batteries to failure, which is obviously important for testing.

16:19We would do all of that in here. So again, in keeping with the philosophy, our design engineers in the building across the street here and then over here prototyping testing development all of that so industry at work so now that I have you I just I figured it'd be best to ask you the hardest question first okay this this is something your whole team actually wanted to address okay and it's a little bit contra confrontational okay is it true that you read every single Slack message? Oh, God, no. No? No, no, no, no, no, no. Simply way too many of them. Way too many of them. No, we have 7 ,000 employees at this point around the world, so we're in something like 14 time zones or something, so they're just all day, every day, all the time.

17:09So no, I can't read everything all the time. What takes up more time, Slack or X? uh slack by a wide margin um but the my habit which is uh potentially ineffective is i sort by um unread and then i sort by uh most recent okay so i'll just when i'm on a like between meetings walking between buildings like have five minutes or something i'll just sort to unread it's not foolproof uh and i have to trust a little bit of the system that if people want to get my attention they'll just send me a direct message. But it works enough to get the pulse of what's going on. So what they're referencing is that they will see me chirp in on some random thread and some random channel on like the London channel with just a comment on something and people will be like, how the hell do you see this?

17:59And that's what it is. It's just work and timing. Well, you're always in the flow. So you do read everything. Kind of. Sure. We'll go with that. We'll go with that. Good marketing, I guess. Where are we heading into now? Okay, so we are in Anderol's headquarters here in Costa Mesa, and this is what we call Building A. This is our research and development building here on campus, and we are entering our machine shop here. So I like to say that here in this machine shop, we can make one or two of anything. So we've got a pretty broad diversity of tooling and equipment in here. On one side, we have the manual shop, and you can hear in the background, those are some guys welding what looks to be the frame of one of our early menaces over there.

18:38A bunch of manual mills, manual lathes, manual bandsaws, think of it as like a custom metal fabrication shop. So if an engineer has an idea, they bring it over here, talk to the fabricators. The fabricators can make pretty much anything. So if you want a custom gate for your driveway all the way through a command and control center for deploying around the world, these guys make one or two of anything. What have you made for yourself? I've made, so the biggest thing I have made is I have tuned the axles on my son's Pinewood Derby car here in this machine shop. Yeah, we're big into the scouts. I'm an Eagle Scout myself.

19:12Both my boys are in the scouts, and we've worked on their Pinewood Derby course. What speed are we getting up to now? Well, he got third in his whole pack. Not fast enough. Not fast enough, I know, but it's coming soon. So we're going to head down this way and get to see some robots cutting metal. So on that side of the shop is our manual side of the shop. Over here is our more robotic side of the shop. So we've got our water jet over there, we've got our press brake here, we've got our laser cutters here, and a bunch of big CNC's cutting metal that we'll talk about. And again, just to kind of play out the point, the whole idea around here is that this is not a large-scale mass manufacturing kind of facility.

19:53This is a prototyping one or two of anything kind of facility. So we can even take a look at some of the parts we have here, like cutting the shop here, designed in our building next door that we'll see some of a little bit later, cutting the shop here, and then put together, welded. This is probably one, maybe two or three that we'll make here. And then once we get the design right, there are much more cost-effective places in America to make these at large scale. I don't even know what this part is. But for that early stage prototyping, having the engineers in the building there have an idea, walk over here, get feedback from fabricators, build things and have that cycle move very quick, ultimately gets us to have products to market faster.

20:34And then in the long run, cheaper, even if this machine shop and this kind of operation is pretty expensive on surface. So these guys here are extremely, extremely talented and can make genuinely one of anything. So we'll see a couple of the parts as we continue on the walk here. Yeah, so we'll make everything from molds for our composite lab that's in the next room over, for parts for our XL submarine, or parts for Fury molds or some Fury bulkheads we'll make here. So basically big, complicated, tricky parts, and they'll send it over here, and this thing is an absolute massive beast and can cut, you know, you can obviously see the size of the piece of metal we can fit in here.

21:15yeah it's pretty cool what are you guys cutting oh my god oh my god yeah um yeah but you can kind of see and see and get the vibe uh i don't know how many of these you've seen on your tours but they can uh they can be pretty cool when they're working at full scale because the platform rotates around it rotates this way rotates that way and then the head itself rotates in every direction so you can get incredibly precise incredibly detailed parts coming out of this machine and again the same philosophy of just relatively low quantity but relatively high iteration speed there go. So there's a fun fact with all the scrap that I really enjoy.

21:50Don't touch it because it's disgusting. It's really greasy and disgusting. But this is just like scrap metal, scrap aluminum that you can reforge back down into usable metal. So there are metal recycling firms around here that can just come and they'll buy just like a full bucket of scrap. You kind of see what they're what they're cutting in here if you want to. These are samples of some of the parts that the that the team in here makes. So everything from jet engine compressor blades, and feel free, the edges are sharp, so be careful. Jet engine compressor blades through very precise helical gears, through, what's probably coolest to prove the point is, let me grab this guy up here.

22:36So for our Bolt product, which is a kind of quadcopter with a small explosive payload on it. The engineers, again, in the building right next door, had an idea for the design. Send it over here to these guys, and then these guys program the CNCs to cut the metal in exactly the right pattern. You can see the precision of the right pattern and where the mounting plates for the different circuit boards and different wiring harnesses go. You can see all of these holes are threaded. So they'll have an idea for iteration one, and then that becomes idea for iteration two. Oh, wow. Yeah. And you can see that starting to look and feel a little bit like what a drone actually looks and feels like.

23:17And then for iteration three, you can see the next iteration, a little bit lighter, a little bit thinner, a little bit different kind of compacted design. Now in the long run, this is the wrong way to make these frames. So taking a huge brick of metal and then using a mill to like cut all of these things out is very expensive, very wasteful, takes a long, long, long time. These machines are expensive. Our machinists are expensive. They're very talented. So, like, taking that time to cut all these things out is not the most efficient way. What you should be doing is casting these. So you create a mold, you pour metal in, cure it, then you get this out of the end.

23:55The problem is that setting up those molds and that tooling for that casting is very time-consuming and comically expensive. So it takes many, many, many months and many hundreds of thousands of dollars to get that tool in just right. Do you work with Rangeview on that? We don't yet. They are one of the vendors we've talked to, but this is exactly what they're trying to fix, make that problem a lot easier. So what we do is that for those iterative cycles where we're looking at like, okay, going from this version to this version to this version, and then we fly it, and I'm sure you've heard about our testing philosophy, testing all the time and all of that, they'll go out and they'll fly and they'll say, ah, this isn't quite right, this angle's not right, this bracket's not right, I want to tweak this, change that.

24:33and you can see some of the subtle differences in where the mounting is and the arms are slightly different positioned. Through that iterative phase, having the engineers there, the shop here, be able to turn quick turns on these, incredibly valuable. Versus the opposite, which is like, I have an idea, I send it to three vendors, I get some quotes, I send them the part, I wait a week or two, I get a part back, just adds so much latency to that system, but doing it here with the team makes it so much faster. Yeah. So and then this one is the basically the near final version of what they ended up shipping.

25:06Is this ceramic? What is on the outside? It's a powder coating. Powder coating? Yeah, for weather resiliency. Yeah. And then the jet engine blades are the really cool part. So thinking of the like, because we have a product line called Venom that is basically our own jet engine blades. And you hold them to each other. And then I can imagine the different pieces coming together, the air inlet for that engine that kind of fits in the front like that. So you can kind of see the different parts of the engine come together. Again, all cut here. Wow. It's fun. Yeah. You have to mark them as sample only so someone doesn't inadvertently put it into a jet engine.