Ships should be designed simply enough that workers without 15 years of welding experience can build them, so the shipbuilding workforce can be trained like assembling IKEA furniture rather than reading an encyclopedia.
Dino says the industrial workforce problem is really a design problem: if a design requires 15 years of expertise, that's the company's fault, and simplifying design ("more like IKEA") is how you rebuild the labor base fast. ✦ AI generated
Dino · a16z Podcast · 2026-05-19 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 4:04
“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.'
verbatim transcript · starts at 4:04
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
5:54parade of production is generally kind of calibrated to what the US Department of Board budget looks like. We can no longer kind of live within those constraints and you've seen some of the deals that we've been able to do with traditional industry in the last 2 months where we've incentivized them to expand their own private capital to expand production with their own funding, which I think then instead of being a handout from the