Shipbuilding should be redesigned to be as simple as assembling IKEA furniture, so people without 15 years of specialized welding experience can build ships effectively, rebuilding the workforce and the culture around shipyard work.
Dino argues that instead of relying on scarce veteran welders, ships should be designed simply enough that a broad workforce can be trained quickly, quoting his manufacturing lead's IKEA analogy. ✦ AI generated
Dino Mavrookas · a16z Podcast · 2026-05-19 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 3:34
“How are you thinking about Saronic investing in some of these forgotten areas, forgotten demographics, as you build out manufacturing across the US?”
Design the ship so you actually don't need 15 years of welding experience to build it in the first place. Then you can actually rebuild and retrain the workforce. I'll steal one of the lines from our head of manufacturing. He says, 'Less like an encyclopedia, more like IKEA.' It's like everybody can build furniture.
verbatim transcript · starts at 3:34
3:34as you build out manufacturing across the US? And has How is scaling been similar different complimentary for the different customer bases that you're targeting? >> I mean, the workforce is critical, right? And Circa and I were talking about the workforce earlier. We have to rebuild the workforce to support the maritime industrial base, right? You can't create people with 15 years of experience overnight. So, it goes back
4:04to the first principles approach design of the ship. Design the ship so you actually don't need 15 years of welding experience to build it in the first place. Then you can actually rebuild and retrain the workforce. Um I'll steal one of the lines from our head of manufacturing. He says, "Less like an encyclopedia, more like IKEA." It's like everybody can build furniture. If somebody can't come out of Somebody
4:32who's building a car for Ford or General Motors or an airplane at Boeing or a rocket ship for SpaceX, and we can't get them highly effective building ships quickly, that's our fault. That means our design isn't simple enough. We don't have the processes or the work instructions or the training materials or something else. So, it's rebuilding and recreating the workforce and changing the culture. What it actually means to work at a shipyard
5:01again. Making it cool, building for the future, giving people a mission, and giving people job security behind that. >> You mentioned the job security piece. Um so, following up generally on your investments, um Honorable Duffy, what investments do you want to see companies making as we look to rebuild the defense industrial base? And maybe I'll expand that to com- companies and private capital. >> Well, I think Dino's got it right in
5:29terms of how we can leverage modern manufacturing. I mean, one of the things that we're finding as we dig down into uh traditional industry, and as we look at you'd mentioned the transition of Defense Security Cooperation Agency under my uh jurisdiction now in on Pentagon, production really is the biggest constraint for us when it comes to fulfilling our foreign military sales orders. And production is generally the