Ships must be redesigned from first principles to use less steel and far fewer labor hours, because you can't win a shipbuilding cost race with China on material or labor prices alone — you have to change the design itself through software autonomy and digitization.
Dino argues the only way to out-compete China on shipbuilding cost is to redesign vessels from first principles for autonomy, since neither steel nor labor can be bought cheaper than China's rates. ✦ AI generated
Dino Mavrookas · a16z Podcast · 2026-05-19 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 1:46
“How have you translated this alignment between Saronic's autonomy and the Navy's no man left behind ethos into contracts? And how do autonomy breakthroughs actually allow you to build more faster products for the Navy?”
You have to bend the economic cost curve. You have to build ships cheaper. You have to build ships faster. The only two levers you have to pull are material costs and labor costs. We're not going to buy steel cheaper than they're buying it in China. So, you have to take a first principles design to the ship and just fundamentally use less steel.
verbatim transcript · starts at 1:46
1:46cheaper. I mean, he should just politely ask me to leave. You have to bend the economic cost curve. You have to build ships cheaper. You have to build ships faster. The only two levers you have to pull are material costs and labor costs. We're not going to buy steel cheaper than they're buying it in China. So, you have to take a first principles design to the ship and
2:10just fundamentally use less steel. How do you do that? You build for software autonomy and digitization. Same thing on labor hours. We're not going to acquire a per hour labor rate cheaper than they're paying in China. So, let's build ships much faster. For example, Marada's using is about a 50,000 labor hour on our first ship. Just for order of magnitude, put it in frame of reference. Apples and oranges comparison here. I'm
2:40going to acknowledge that up front. But a destroyer is 7 to 9 million >> Wow. >> labor hours. So, that's the scale and speed that autonomy unlocks because you can redesign the whole platform and make it much simpler to build. And then you build the Then you have the capability at the scale that you need to keep as many people as possible out of combat scenarios. >> You
3:06You mentioned the sort of factories and bringing bringing autonomy into the actual manufacturing processes. You've put real money behind rebuilding the American industrial base, most notably a major expansion of your Louisiana shipyard, as well as getting prepared to launch Port Arthur where we're excited We're excited for news there at some point soon. How are you thinking about Saronic investing in some of these forgotten areas forgotten demographics
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
- ·Only two levers exist: material costs and labor hours
- ·China's steel prices cannot be beaten
- ·Direct cost competition on labor is also unwinnable
- ·Bend the economic curve through design, not procurement
- ·Use fundamentally less steel per vessel
- ·Autonomy and digitization slash labor hours at the source