DRA launches 'Build the West V1' — automated work instruction software for manufacturers goes generally available

here in New York very apt introduction thank you Mr cougan yeah I heard you're in the the Empire State Building is that right that is correct we are in the capital building of the capital city of the Empire you know what better place to help rebuild the American Empire if I uh take my camera and PIV it behind me you can kind of see overhead that's the The View I loveon yards back there a little bit of a foggy day but on a clear day you can actually see New Jersey and very cool we've intentionally positioned it such that you know we can keep an eye on them make sure they don't invade okay okay yeah yeah little manhattanite nationalism I I like it uh have you thought about getting have you thought about trying to get logo rights on the building yes if you text like one of those five digit numbers you can actually get uh daily updates on how they'll change the colors for the building oh really okay so yeah we're you know we got something cooking you know yeah you got to get like an iconic color way for the company so that when you throw it up in the building everyone knows these guys are working late tonight they threw their colors up on the building you know like ramp owns yellow YC owns orange you need to pick a color probably going to be you know we're building the blueprint of the future so some variant of blue I love it I love it uh G just I mean we jump right into it but can you give a little background on like the company what you're building where you are in terms of like kind of stage and and size yeah sure um give everybody a little bit of background about myself background's originally in electrical engineering and Robotics uh was over ging for a little bit you know got TS clearance worked on some pretty cool radar stuff over there uh did a little bit of e work a little bit of mechi work a little bit of Technic work over there just got to see how absurdly archaic all of the infrastructure was on the manufacturing side of things was starting to get the feeling that the West Was forgetting how to build great things and I wanted to make sure that that didn't happen so got my best friend and co-founder and when I have to go start Thea um so as a company we are building the first automated work construction plat sounds like a very vague very Niche thing but turns out everybody actually has had experience with work constructions um if You' ever built like Ikea furniture oh yeah a little paper instruction book that tells you how to build a thing uh turns out that is actually basically how they make missiles and cars and everything in between so that process is like imagine you're a dude in Factory somebody says here is a cad file or 3D model of like an engine go figure it out like literally go figure out they will like pull this assembly apart they'll figure what order to do the assembly in super duper me manually take hundreds of screenshots or photos and then throw all that together into a several 100 page document or you know word Docker PowerPoint over the course of weeks or months super brutal super manual sounds as awful as it is almost as bad as being like a Mackenzie analyst with like a 100 page PowerPoint it's like making an Ikea slideshow by hand yeah yeah I think we saw this week uh some videos went viral of uh folks painting artillery shells by hand and arer shell moves from one station to the other and there's the basic commentary was like how are we still doing it like this this is not great uh but you could imagine some work order system was built at some point for that and that that that kind of concretizes what you're building uh so so yeah how's it going uh where is the business now are you live in public beta how much does this thing cost like H how does the business actually work right so what CAD you know CAD software was for mechanical engineers we're building basically that 2 for Century update to the process for their blue collar counterpart person called the manufacturing engine got we pric pretty similarly we price 5K per seat per year okay um it's a cpay system uh we actually great timing for me to come on the Pod and chat with you guys uh we actually just went live and announced uh build the West V1 uh yesterday you know Fully live we are now you know Enterprise gradations iar compliance here for itar compliance we love an itar compant company on the show congratulations ah epic thank you fellas uh so yes we can now Deploy on Prem to defense customer we're already working with some defense companies working with a bunch of Automotive companies uh we love tier one through three suppliers oems got a bunch of really cool companies that are not just you know Aerospace and Automotive these are like two the only two industries that apparently most people think exist but you know we're working with like Agriculture and construction manufacturers these are companies that like Rec recent one that we just started working with super cool company called uh spudnik these guys make the potato harvesting equipment you drag behind name I love it spudnick it's the Sputnik moment for potato farming apparently they're saying yes so we're We're Off to the Races product is live we're deploying congratulations what is it like deploying on Prem does that mean you have to package your software up and send them like a CD or something or floppy drive like not a CD the the caveat here is that they have to have their own uh cloud-based resources themselves got it can inter API as you need to yeah yeah it's a little bit more complicated than that but I'll sort of leave it at that like they have to have some like cloud based infrastructure deploy by terraform this is a thing we can now do ladies and gents oh cool yeah it's there process for it I'm sure you've been talking to your customers constantly as one does but uh what's their broad reaction been over the last 24 hours are people I imagine some of your customers are super excited uh about the tariffs others on sure others negatively impacted in varying ways but you know give us the update there yeah so on on the whole tariff thing uh man so some of our customers are a little bit upset because prices are going to go up for them um it sort of depends where you are industry yeah so that's that's like the input costs are going to go up because maybe they're sourcing in the short term in the short term um you know they're they're pretty upset about that um on on a couple of different vectors but it again depends like if you look at the um what's really cool about like our compan is we get to see like the widest varieties of like the coolest CAD files coolest assemblies you'll ever see and so you know if you look at like the hierarchy and the structure of a cad file it's very tree likee and so that hierarchy of like an assembly of subassemblies of subassemblies of subassemblies really neatly mimics the supply chain of that product there some really really neat novel insights that we get to see and so if you are like a one of those subassemblies you're called like a tier one through three supplier if you're making like the top level thing and you're like you know an andil or a Toyota you're an oem the oems are a little bit more upset than the tier one to three suppliers as from what I've seen um and so more broadly like material input costs are like closer to the tier one through 3es than like the oems the oems get like the final markup which is sort of like a pain uh and so that's kind of what we've seen but I think by and large people are short-term like upset long-term pretty excited because what it means is it's going to force a lot of capital to be allocated towards rebuilding domestically which is honestly what a lot of the folks that we work with want right you want your supply chain proximal to you you want to have expectable lead times you know that's been like one of the one of the worst things that a lot of folks we work with have SE so for a company uh for an ATS Scale Company like you know that like a prime like Northrup what percent for the average product at Northrup do you have any sense of what percentage of the parts that go into a specific end product are americanmade today and do you think that companies at that scale are going to you know feel like they need to react and even invest in some of these uh tiered suppliers so uh I don't have a perfect number for you but what I do know is that companies like seens companies like uh stellantis these are companies that are Global in nature and actually not like traditionally headquartered in the us and we're seeing a lot of them shift more of their production to the US immediately like over the past you know couple of months we've seen huge announcements from Seaman and stantis to move production to the US and open up new facilities triple down on you know American based production because if you are selling to the American Market you want your cost to be as low as possible and so it only makes more sense to have your production be domestic um so yeah yeah how do how do you think about uh I feel like one of the bottlenecks to D Rock's growth I said that right correct DQ durak durak I'm GNA get it this time it's Iraq with a d uh uh one of the bottlenecks to drax's growth is going to just be having enough if you're selling by the seat having enough manufacturing Engineers right I yeah I don't I wish I knew more myself um how how do you think about kind of like the talent equation to solving um you know to reindustrialize so there's uh okay I I can get on my Soap Box there's like a coup there's like two to three pieces get on it get on it get on it see you know broadly um kind of interesting the number of manufacturing I'll give you a little bit of like the history lesson the blueprint in general so basically until like the like early 70s mid 70s engineers and manufacturers were connected by one thing and that was the blueprint right like classic cyano type blueprint that you imagine your head when you say blueprint and then like the you know late 70s early 80s cat software emerged and became ubiquitous and basically all of the mechanical who were on the shop floor super well integrated production they were more Blue Collar than white collar generally all of them basically moved to the back office went from being generally blue collar to white collar and basically since then like manufact like the mechanical design had become like totally divorced from reality you often now have like mechanical engineers never going to shop floors often times designing systems that are generally like not manufacturable and so the blueprint was basically like fractured into two parts cats sofware on the design side work instructions on the build side cats sofware got a ton upgrades for 50 years work instructions never did that's what we're working on and so when that happened you also saw like the you know the archetypal mechanical engineer also fractur you know fractur into two different people like the mechanical engineer that's like your more typical like design engineer and a manufacturing engineer so actually if you look like statistically in the US there are actually roughly the same number of mechanical engineers as there are manufacturing so there's like around 300,000 of these folks in the US I globally so it's actually like really big popular job um it's just like you know this is where you you would like get a mechanical engineering degree and like you know half the time people just like go into manufacturing engineering and so there was an enormous uh so back to like the the portion about like the labor base um these are the folks who will get a cad file and like figure out how to put this thing together and their documentation systems suck I mean it is like often times if it's not PowerPoint or word it's a poit or like the back of their head so what we've been seeing unfortunately is you know especially postco you know a lot of these folks are retiring a lot of these folks have all this information locked up in the back of their heads as tribal knowledge and so yes like we're automating like a good chunk of the grunt workk of making work instructions you know we take a cad Final in we automatically figure out how to put together automatically generate 80 to 90% of the work instruction but that 10 or 20% that we can't automate that is like the tribal knowledge component and that is what we serve as like a data aggregation platform for so a lot of what we see is you know age of the American manufacturer is like somewhere between like 45 and 55 I like to say 55 just to be a little bit more precautionary and you know in the US we do not want cheap labor right we want smart labor that's what we want to be advocating for we want to build new technologies and we want to build new Manufacturing Systems that take advantage of automation but we do not want to like replace people in general we want to augment and aggregate as much of their tribal knowledge and bake it into the systems that we use for the next generation of American manufacturing like that's kind of how we see it however what we've seen like for our customer base generally speaking is you know the the the classic question of like uh oh like I buy like some dra software now because I can do the work of 10 people with one person I can lay nine people off and it's like no no no it's actually that uh you know because nine of your people retired and you're still left with one now I don't have to shut my manufacturing facility down so like that's where we see a lot of the value ad and value generation but also more broadly as a company we're not just stand and work instructions that's just uh you know where we're interjecting what do you what do you think about mbas you know buying small manufacturing businesses rolling them up last question BR brutal brutal as a concept awful idea I'm actually generally Pro engineers and manufacturers rolling up uh like SBS like midmarket manufacturers this is uh you know I think a very interesting concept as a whole if you were to like you know if you as a uh as somebody with a like a hardware background had a very specific like search fund for like pumps or valves and you like really knew who to like like where the optimizations could be generated if you came in and you were like we're going on Google Drive guys like no more like writing stuff on Post-its like that could be very interesting that's useful but like an NBA comes in they look at the p&l and they're like ah like cut everybody over 50 and it's like no the tribal knowledge that's like where those guys knew how things fit together you didn't write it down and now your factory doesn't know how to build [ __ ] anymore and now we're Serbian we're cowt to China and it's over and it's over but we don't want that to happen never cow toow never cow toow well thanks for coming on the show this is fantastic this is great uh you got to come back when you have more news I'm sure there's going to be a ton this year it's a crazy time crazy year and we're excited uh for what you're doing out in New York keeping Manhattan safe from those New Jersey folks yes thank you guys for having me and I will catch you guys later looking forward to the next one cheers hello Phil great dude always a what a guy very well spoken yeah just high energy knows his business lots of good takes tapped in you love to see it uh well speaking of tapped in we got Zach from plaid coming next uh he had some big news today fascinating story fascinating company uh if you've ever authenticated done ooth with your bank you've probably seen the Plaid pop up and he is here now I'll let him explain buiness because he probably knows him way better than I do Zack welcome to the