#37 - Manufacturing, America, China | Cameron Schiller, CEO Rangeview

Summary

Ti Morse interviews Cameron Schiller, co-founder and CEO of Rangeview, which is building America’s first “Cyber Foundry” — a next-generation metal casting facility. Cameron opens with a bold claim: Xi Jinping has weaponized manufacturing, and China has the most advanced machine shops and factories in the world. If China decided to restrict access, companies like Apple and Tesla would be devastated. Rangeview’s mission is to bring advanced casting capability back to America.

The conversation traces Cameron’s journey from manufacturing things in China as a kid to building robotics competition robots, to participating in the “Made in China Initiative” which gave him firsthand experience in Chinese factories. He explains the history of casting as one of the oldest forms of metalworking and why it remains essential. Cameron discusses why he chose to drop out of college to pursue Rangeview, the difference between manufacturing and mere assembly, how SpaceX had to build its own foundry because no American supplier could meet their needs, and the experience of charging Bird scooters to fund his first business. The interview also covers why manufacturing startups are fundamentally different from fintech, how Cameron thinks about engineering emotions and designing beautiful industrial spaces, his perspective on understanding a society through their cars, and why the VW GTI is an amazing car.

Highlights

”Xi Jinping Weaponized Manufacturing”

“Xi Jinping weaponized manufacturing. China has the most advanced machine shops, the most advanced factories. If China was like, for some reason, I don’t know, they just decided to cut things off — companies like Apple and Tesla would be in serious trouble.” — Cameron Schiller, 0:00

yt-dlp --download-sections "*0:00-0:30" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxYug2Q7Di8" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "xi-weaponized-manufacturing.mp4"

”Never Listen to McKinsey”

“Never listen to McKinsey. Every time a company follows McKinsey’s advice on manufacturing, they end up worse off.” — Cameron Schiller, 7:26

yt-dlp --download-sections "*7:26-8:30" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxYug2Q7Di8" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "never-listen-mckinsey.mp4"

”SpaceX Had to Build Their Own Foundry”

“SpaceX had to build their own foundry because no American supplier could meet their casting needs. That tells you everything about the state of American manufacturing.” — Cameron Schiller, 47:18

yt-dlp --download-sections "*47:18-48:30" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxYug2Q7Di8" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "spacex-foundry.mp4"

”Charging Bird Scooters to Fund His First Business”

“I was charging Bird scooters at night to make money to fund my first business. You’d just pick them up, charge them in your apartment, and drop them off in the morning.” — Cameron Schiller, 32:56

yt-dlp --download-sections "*32:56-34:00" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxYug2Q7Di8" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "bird-scooters.mp4"

Key Points

• Xi weaponized manufacturing (0:00) - China has the most advanced factories; cutting off access would devastate Western companies
• History of casting (1:12) - One of the oldest ways of forming metal, essential to modern manufacturing
• Finding the American Dream in China (2:01) - Cameron found manufacturing capability in China that no longer existed in the US
• Never listen to McKinsey (7:26) - Consulting firms gave bad manufacturing advice leading to offshoring
• America’s first Cyber Foundry (7:26) - Rangeview is building a next-gen automated casting facility
• Manufacturing things in China as a kid (8:25) - Cameron was manufacturing products in Chinese factories as a teenager
• Made in China Initiative (11:57) - Program that gave Cameron firsthand experience in Chinese factories
• Growing up doing robotics (14:28) - Robotics competitions shaped Cameron’s engineering mindset
• Manufacturing vs assembly (27:47) - Critical distinction most people get wrong; assembly is not manufacturing
• Charging Bird scooters (32:56) - Charged scooters at night to fund his first business
• Manufacturing is not fintech (39:55) - Hardware companies require fundamentally different approaches than software
• SpaceX built own foundry (47:18) - SpaceX had to vertically integrate casting because no American supplier could deliver
• Robotics competitions in China (50:55) - Competing against Chinese robotics teams showed the talent gap
• Engineering emotions (59:30) - Designing beautiful industrial spaces that inspire workers
• Understanding society through cars (1:02:25) - You can understand a society’s values by looking at their cars
• Why the GTI is amazing (1:06:13) - The VW GTI represents perfect engineering at an accessible price
• Dropping out of college (1:09:27) - Cameron dropped out to pursue Rangeview full-time

Mentions

Companies

• Rangeview (0:30) - Building America’s first Cyber Foundry for advanced casting
• SpaceX (47:18) - Had to build their own foundry due to lack of American suppliers
• Apple (0:00) - Would be devastated if China cut manufacturing access
• Tesla (0:00) - Would be devastated if China cut manufacturing access
• McKinsey (7:26) - Consulting firm criticized for bad manufacturing advice
• Bird (32:56) - Scooter company Cameron charged scooters for to make money

People

• Cameron Schiller (0:30) - Co-founder and CEO of Rangeview
• Xi Jinping (0:00) - Referenced as having weaponized manufacturing

Surprising Quotes

“Xi Jinping weaponized manufacturing. If China just decided to cut things off, companies like Apple and Tesla would be in serious trouble.” — Cameron Schiller, 0:00

“I was charging Bird scooters at night to make money to fund my first business.” — Cameron Schiller, 32:56

“SpaceX had to build their own foundry because no American supplier could meet their casting needs.” — Cameron Schiller, 47:18

“You can understand a society’s values by looking at their cars.” — Cameron Schiller, 1:02:25

Transcript

Cameron Schiller: 0:00 Xi Jinping weaponized manufacturing. China has the most advanced machine shops, the most advanced factories. If China was like, for some reason I don’t want America to have CNC machines, it’d be a very big problem.

Ti Morse: 0:11 You found the American dream in China.

Cameron Schiller: 0:12 I did. No, I really did.

Ti Morse: 0:16 Cameron Schiller is one of the co-founders of Rangeview, which is a startup here in El Segundo.

Cameron Schiller: 0:23 I try.

Ti Morse: 0:25 He does try. Um, yeah, I think my opening got killed, so why don’t you introduce like what the hell casting is and what Rangeview is?

Cameron Schiller: 0:30 Oh man, I love casting. Talk to you all night about casting. Okay. So, yeah, I mean what’s what’s interesting? Yes, so we we make parts. We make castings at at Rangeview and we’re trying to trying to invent a new way to do it. We think that casting can be done a lot better with modern technology and uh, and Rangeview’s on a on a path to to develop, implement, and scale the foundry system that re-industrializes America.

Ti Morse: 1:01 Boom. Yeah. That’s it. That’s the mission.

Cameron Schiller: 1:05 That’s the entire thing. It’s pretty simple.

Ti Morse: 1:08 It’s pretty simple. Um, let’s let’s chat about like what is the history of casting? Just can you walk me through?

Cameron Schiller: 1:12 Oh man. Yeah. It’s one of the like oldest ways of forming metal. Okay. You can you can look into and and that’s cuz um, it’s actually due to like one pretty pretty simple fact and that’s that sand is really good at holding molten metal. And so the original castings were made by people like hand forming stuff with beeswax, putting it into sand, and then pouring molten metal, melting out the beeswax and pushing up against like the sand castle that the beeswax made and you’ve you’ve just got a part shaped the same way as beeswax. So, all the initial types of jewelry were made with it and then it scaled and scaled into bigger castings and now castings are one of the most kind of overlooked forms of critical components in in the world right now. For me, I was trying to figure out how to how to bring it back to America. I was trying to figure out how to bring the spirit back to America. Like I I grew up going back and forth to to China a lot. Um, not like a lot lot. Like my ops should not, you know… like don’t be worried. Um, but I do have a few stamps in the passport and man, the the… but the people worked hard there, man. Like, it was it was kind of it was like one of the first big hits to to see um, like how how hardcore…

Ti Morse: 2:35 You were seeing 996 in IRL.

Cameron Schiller: 2:37 Dude they were they were I’d put it this way, like the American dream felt very real in China and I came back to you know where I grew up and it was not so not so real in America. Um, yeah.

Ti Morse: 2:51 You found the American dream in China.

Cameron Schiller: 2:56 I did. No, I really did. Dude, it was not so hot. No. My mindset is like, I found the American dream in China in that everybody wanted to like work very hard for a future. They could like move to the East Coast in these Shenzhen like special economic zones that were developing and people worked extremely hard to be a part of something meaningful in the world and I didn’t see that happening in America as much. And, uh, there a whole bunch of reasons for that, but I was on a mission to build a company that would reverse that and, uh, it I think America just needs to make more parts. I think it’s as simple as that. And McKinsey told us that, uh, the best way to do so is to make robots cheaper. So I built robots for a long time. Um, the beginning of Rangeview was actually Rangeview Robotics.

Ti Morse: 3:43 I know.

Cameron Schiller: 3:45 Yeah.

Ti Morse: 3:45 You did your research.

Cameron Schiller: 3:46 I did a little bit. For like about a year we messed around making harmonic drives, which is this like core cost driving component inside of a robot arm. We’re going to make really cheap robot arms and then we tried to sell them to to factories and that didn’t work so well. These factories didn’t want robots. McKinsey was actually wrong.

Ti Morse: 4:00 You mean like McKinsey was wrong?

Cameron Schiller: 4:01 No.

Ti Morse: 4:02 The generalizations were big enough that like yes, you did have to cut costs. Yeah. But I get the right founding story for Rangeview was literally you looking at McKinsey reports, correct?

Cameron Schiller: 4:18 It was actually Bain and BCG. McKinsey’s a second tier. Um, I’m a big joker. Okay. No, uh, oh man. No it all it all came back from, uh—

Ti Morse: 4:25 No, it all came back from—

Cameron Schiller: 4:27 No, I’d say there’s like one thing that caused us to cast, it was actually just a sober analysis of the state of American manufacturing. We looked at literally every form of manufacturing, of which there are hundreds, and said, which one is the most down bad? And we literally just went after that one.

Ti Morse: 4:43 Why the hell is casting so down bad?

Cameron Schiller: 4:45 Casting’s pretty down bad. It was left for dead, dude. Um, well, I mean the biggest reason is basically that Xi Jinping weaponized manufacturing. He just straight subsidized all the stuff you need to manufacture and America didn’t see it as a critical…

Ti Morse: 5:08 Like threat?

Cameron Schiller: 5:09 Yeah. They saw it as like a secondary thing because ITAR and other restrictions tried to keep directly the most important stuff made in America, but it didn’t account for how connected private sector manufacturing was to DOD manufacturing. And so by just keeping like the critical component of a ship and all of its infrastructure in America, you actually lost the ability to like move resources over from private sector to DOD for surge production, you lost all the innovation, the most innovative manufacturing setups, processes— equipment are all happening in China right now. So you lost, you lost an entire sector which was like innovative manufacturing. The one place where it did, where I see innovation really happening at scale in, in America, is sheet metal fab. Shout out Jim.

Ti Morse: 6:21 Wouldn’t that also be like Kenneth Castle?

Cameron Schiller: 6:23 Yeah, yeah, those guys. And then, the second one, which is CNC manufacturing. But like, the vast majority of CNC innovation happened when people put motors on the axes of CNC machines and now it’s all about uptime. So it’s like how long can we keep the drill bit spinning and make sure the right drill bit’s in place and the like right work order’s in place. It’s just like a bunch of like top-level optimizations you can do on that manufacturing problem. But like, casting hasn’t had its CNC moment yet. We haven’t like put motors in the foundries and connected them to computers and and told the computers here’s how to like command the operation. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re, you know, robotics background, going into casting to, you know, to make parts better. And ultimately for customers, that means more reliable, faster, and cheaper, and at scale. Not just like onesies, twosies for your like little prototype, but thousands to hundreds of thousands of units for the next generation of America, which hopefully is a lot, making a lot more stuff here.

Ti Morse: 7:26 Yeah, so this is quite an operation that you’re going to have to just make this place livable. What’s that like?

Cameron Schiller: 7:33 Yeah, I mean, we’re in a, an old aerospace engine manufacturing hangar. That’s where we chose to build the next generation of American foundries. We’re calling it a cyber-foundry. So we’re building America’s first cyber-foundry, one of thousands. And we have a, I mean we have a lot of construction happening right now. You know, we’re operating out of two facilities right now. We’ve got our technology development facility down the street and we’ve got this for production scaling. And this, you know, hopefully will significantly contribute to America’s future. That’s the, yeah, that’s the mission. We, we try to be, take yourself seriously on the mission, but, yeah, but you gotta do it with some fun.

Ti Morse: 8:23 Gotta do it with a little bit of fun.

Cameron Schiller: 8:24 Yeah, a little bit, yeah.

Ti Morse: 8:26 Do you want to talk about like going to China when you were a kid? I know that like I was talking with Aaron the other day, Aaron Slodov, and you know, I asked like, did you tour any factories in China? And actually, he didn’t apparently. But you did. You toured like a lot of factories in China. I think. Right?

Cameron Schiller: 8:41 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my whole life has been manufacturing. I was born into a manufacturing neighborhood. I did robotics for manufacturing. I did, you know, actual manufacturing in Shenzhen and Guangzhou and Dongguan.

Ti Morse: 8:59 What were you making there?

Cameron Schiller: 9:00 …everything from consumer electronics to, uh, like injection molded plastics and, and, uh, rubbers, uh, to textiles.

Ti Morse: 9:09 Yeah.

Cameron Schiller: 9:10 So, a bunch of time in Xiamen doing textiles, that was, that was my first company. We were, you know, global distribution, sold in Japan, um, took me back and forth to China all throughout my, my high school. I actually just like didn’t take any of my high school finals.

Ti Morse: 9:26 Wait, what?

Cameron Schiller: 9:27 Like I just didn’t show up for the classes. Um, it was not a good look.

Ti Morse: 9:32 Wait, so your first, your like main first business was textiles?

Cameron Schiller: 9:35 Yeah.

Ti Morse: 9:36 So you didn’t listen to Buffett at all?

Cameron Schiller: 9:38 I did, I did what was the furthest from what I knew, which was like very high labor form of, form of manufacturing, um, which showed you a lot about the world, right? Like when labor’s a big part of the manufacturing cost, you start to see the city that something is made in, the, the people by which it’s, it’s made with, um, shift a lot, right? And I had a few big experiences over in China seeing, seeing not so great stuff that made me think, um, you know, America’s really building off the, off the back of other countries that are, that are truly doing like sweatshop labor. Um, and there’s no reason, like it could totally be done by machines and it just takes innovation and technology. And that’s the, I think that’s the path forward for, for humanity. Like first for America from a national security perspective and then for the world. It’s clearly where we need to go. When we manufacture on other planets, we’re not gonna, you know, have hundreds of thousands to millions of people that can literally live across the, the hallway in like five cots in a tiny room, you know, wake up and only go back to their, to their family once a year.

Ti Morse: 10:54 Yeah.

Cameron Schiller: 10:55 And I, I spent a good amount of my childhood experiencing this and it was quite a, quite a shocking experience. Um…

Ti Morse: 11:01 Did you see any factories with nets?

Cameron Schiller: 11:04 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was a, that was a pretty big experience when I was 14. I so, there was two experiences. The first was…

Ti Morse: 11:11 Wait, how, how the hell did your like family just be like comfortable with you flying to China alone at 14?

Cameron Schiller: 11:17 My dad was a big part of the offshoring movement. So he was a, yeah, he was an inventor that, um, took me to China with him and same way a lot of these like initial American firms were excited about chasing the like Wall Street globalization trend. Trend, you know, you can half your product cost by going overseas. And so he, he took me with him and that’s how I first started seeing it when I was, you know, eight years old and then I started going by myself and and that’s when you really start to see I think a different side of the country. Um, but Sam from Impulse, um, is another person I connect with over this. Actually seeing real serious production.

Ti Morse: 11:57 Yeah.

Cameron Schiller: 11:58 He has some, some great stories.

Ti Morse: 12:00 Yeah, I mean the most… The most serious production happening inside of the world right now hands down is China. I mean China has the most advanced machine shops, China has the most advanced factories of basically any type short of chip production. I don’t think this is like understood by the world right now and I think it’s critical to understand. And we taught them all how to do it, right? Like there are literal programs that the you know president made, ‘Made in China’ initiative where you had to you know partner with American… if you’re an American businessman and wanted to make something in China, you had to share with a Chinese factory owner all of your process. And so you basically created like a standard operating procedure for factory owners who then went on to go pick it up and run with it. And the thesis was ultimately that America was the only person like capable of designing these things and that didn’t shape up to be true. I think the earliest sign of this was DJI. DJI like almost wiped GoPro. They clearly built better drones.

Cameron Schiller: 13:12 Well they did. I mean long term they did. GoPro’s like an 80 million dollar company now. DJI’s worth billions.

Ti Morse: 13:19 Yeah GoPro tried to… there’s like a key moment when GoPro tried to build their own FPV drone. But yeah I mean talk to any like good drone person or quadcopter person in America and it’s super clear. Like DJI is not just… like DJI is more than two times ahead. It is unbelievable.

Cameron Schiller: 13:44 Like an order of magnitude better?

Ti Morse: 13:45 Something between those two numbers I would say. It’s proof that China is capable of unbelievable design feats. I think we’re lacking…

Cameron Schiller: 13:58 I think we’re lacking in robotics.

Ti Morse: 13:59 Actually you know what? I think we’re lacking in robotics now. I think we’ve been surpassed. Yeah. Unitree’s like humanoid robots are far superior to any of America’s robots.

Cameron Schiller: 14:13 Also way, way, way cheaper. Like it’s I think it’s like what is it? Less than $10,000, something like that.

Ti Morse: 14:18 That’s the other thing like things can be built at scale because they were designed for scale. America lost the art of design for manufacturability.

Cameron Schiller: 14:28 Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so when you I guess you started going to China when you were I guess eight. And so by the time you like enter robotics, I guess you’re one of the few robotics world champions and not only that, you like did it I think as a standalone team with just you versus teams of like 12 to 15 people.

Ti Morse: 14:50 Yep.

Cameron Schiller: 14:51 So when you’re like 13 you start doing robotics and you’ve been going to China for five years like seeing all this stuff. What was kind of your thought process for really going deep on that?

Ti Morse: 14:58 Robotics is a really big deal in my life.

Cameron Schiller: 15:00 I was basically one of those kids that just put myself in the garage, um, which like that garage is a really big deal to me. And Rangeview is the name of the street that that garage was on.

Ti Morse: 15:10 Oh really? Amazing.

Cameron Schiller: 15:12 And built, yeah, you know, I mean all day long, like more time building robots than going to school throughout most of middle school and then all of high school. Um, I think robotics is kind of like the next crypto.

Ti Morse: 15:28 Explain that. You gotta explain that.

Cameron Schiller: 15:32 I feel like a lot of tourists and and people love their humanoids and their robot arms, uh, which is like if you’re, you know, in the early plane game and you’re like trying to understand the first principles of flying, like design wings. We’re out here designing wings and you know, people are out there flapping like birds. That’s kind of what humanoids are, uh, as like a- a career roboticist. Um, not to say like it won’t work ever, uh, it’s just kind of silly.

Ti Morse: 16:05 I gotta imagine it’s something like the car industry where it just, yeah, I think there was like something like 2,000 different car manufacturers in the first like 30 years of car. And I believe all but three went bankrupt.

Cameron Schiller: 16:21 Wow.

Ti Morse: 16:22 Yeah. There was, there used to be a like book of every auto manufacturer and it was just pages and pages of these names.

Cameron Schiller: 16:30 And all consolidated?

Ti Morse: 16:31 No, most of them just went bankrupt.

Cameron Schiller: 16:32 Yeah, most of them just went bankrupt. Yeah, most of the airlines consolidated, but most of the car manufacturers went bankrupt. Yeah, I was in DC at the Air and Space Museum looking at the history of airlines, which is so tied to the history of, uh, casting and what we do actually. Like those all enabled by investment casting, which was this little small point. But yeah, so beyond the robotics thing. Did- grew up doing robotics a whole bunch, being very thoughtful about what makes a good automation opportunity and then decided manufacturing. The robotics was an interest thing, that was always what I was into. And manufacturing was what I felt like my mission was.

Ti Morse: 17:10 Why is manufacturing your mission?

Cameron Schiller: 17:13 I think there’s two reasons. The first is from an impact perspective, you can as an engineer either design things or design the rulebook with which you can design things. And manufacturing is the second thing. There’s a- exhibit at the California Science Museum where there is a, um, you know, three, there are three generations of the space program capsule. They go all the way up to the Apollo program, right? Starting at Redstone. Um, and you see just how different these capsules are over time. The metal’s very dull and every edge is kind of bent over and it’s like this rivet construction. And then at the very end everything gets like…

Ti Morse: 18:00 That polished, shiny, filleted, anodized look. And what happened between those two was the CNC machine really getting figured out. You know, humans aren’t cranking the knobs anymore, motors are. And the engineers didn’t think harder about how to make a part, right? What happened was someone gave them a new rulebook. So from an impact perspective, working on manufacturing is one of the most impactful things that you can do as an engineer. Like real process innovation, right?

Cameron Schiller: 18:29 Hmm.

Ti Morse: 18:31 And then the second interest is, I think that it is responsible for bringing back core American ideals, which will be necessary for the next few decades of the country. I think America can do with a lot more, call it personal responsibility. I think there’s some story that I always tell about the Western pioneer looking out upon the plains and thanking his God and his country for the opportunity to make life for his family. Because there’s no guaranteed rocking chair at even’s time, there’s no, you know, there’s an old-fashioned philosophy that you’re going to pick up the pickaxe and get to work. That’s the type of energy that built this country’s skyline. And over time, we’ve become soft and we’ve started to work on things that don’t make us feel responsible for who we are. Who we are to ourselves, who we are to our friends, and who we are to our community. And I think working on real things really makes that happen. And when you’ve really made something, made something real—not made something to sell some equity in your company, not made something to look cool, but made something that, you know, gets a mother home to see her child from the East Coast to the West Coast. Like a real piece of matter that did something for someone’s life.

Cameron Schiller: 20:12 Create some real value.

Ti Morse: 20:14 It’s an unbelievable feeling. And the entire industry of our world, which is aerospace manufacturing, is that, right? Like someone made the ability for you to, long time ago, have hot water, all the way to today, Starlink gives you WiFi everywhere. Like someone, someone did that, right? And the feeling of that comes back to you when you’re responsible for making it. And that’s just something you don’t get with another widget or another B2B SaaS token or agent, right?

Cameron Schiller: 20:54 You go, you know, you’re doing the robotics thing initially, and you eventually decide that that’s not what you should be doing.

Ti Morse: 21:00 How long did you stay on the robotics idea for McKinsey? And how long until you pivoted to the casting idea from McKinsey?

Cameron Schiller: 21:08 Yeah, so about a year and a half. And we were selling these robots, developing them, and that’s still very cool and cutting edge, like people want cheap robots.

Ti Morse: 21:19 What type of robots would you have been making?

Cameron Schiller: 21:21 So we were building the fundamental unit of automation, which is an actuator. So actuators are responsible for converting the digital world of signals into the physical world of position. And an actuator is made of a motor, a gearbox, and a motor controller. And the motor and motor controller have largely been figured out, like BLDCs and FOC control for the respective technologies are both quite good now. The gearbox world was very niche. You have to reduce backlash and you kind of get sent into a world of monopolies. So actuators. So we’re building these actuators. They’d roll up into a robotic system, a dog, an arm, something, but it’d reduce the cost of that entire system multifold. And we built these really good robots and then we realized there was an opportunity there, but it wasn’t the real opportunity. The real opportunity is someone’s actually got to do the work. Like we mistakenly thought that we could build tools for factory builders, and then we realized nobody knew who was building factories. Like, we needed factories years ago, because these things take years to spin up, and they’re not happening. Like not nearly at the rates that we need them to happen. We need people that seriously understand manufacturing and the future of America to please place big bets on manufacturing. So we chose to build a factory. And when you choose to build a factory, you kind of got to figure out what you’re going to do in that factory, right? One of the big things that we wanted to do was we wanted to capture a lot of the supply chain. A good way to understand how valuable a factory is, is to see its inputs and its outputs. You see what is that converting, right? And so our factory converts raw material, ingots and metal, literally coming out of right a refinery and a master heat producer, and we make turn key cast components, like ready to go. That’s a huge amount of value chain. And there’s still risk on both sides to be clear. A lot of the material mining and refinement issues, they’re very big. America is not producing as much neodymium, samarium, cobalt. I mean there’s a huge list and there was an executive order dropped recently to address these critical minerals. So we’re not even like making the the stuff that flows all the way up to like you getting your, you know, nice solder.

Ti Morse: 24:00 Like this whole thing is built… Have you seen that meme? You put the meme up where it’s like all the dominoes and like that one little thing…

Cameron Schiller: 24:10 Right, right, like at the very top is like DoorDash…

Ti Morse: 24:15 Like all the way down is like neodymium magnet refinement. Like if you flicked that out, which by the way China could do tomorrow…

Cameron Schiller: 24:23 Yeah.

Ti Morse: 24:24 It’s over.

Cameron Schiller: 24:27 Dude, your burrito is not coming. The very top is your Chipotle burrito getting financed by Klarna for four easy payments.

Ti Morse: 24:36 Like the motors in the car of the person that’s, you know, driving your food, the magnet in the, you know, the system in your phone to tell your phone where it is in the world, like it all relies on this. And it just takes one little thing to go wrong and it’s over. When we’re making things and we’re talking about moving capability back to America because we’ve lost it, you really want folks that are working on on really early problems or broad problems.

Cameron Schiller: 25:14 Mm.

Ti Morse: 25:15 So all that tail-end stuff and and this is a big problem in America today is the vast majority of factories are screwdriver factories. They’re just screwing together bolt-on components from overseas. There’s this story in Freedom’s Forge, which is a great book, of America converting its car factories over to bomber factories. Like we need planes to fly, so we gotta stop making the trucks, right? Like put together some bombers and they did it. And there’s lots of arguments around why that was like the ability to mobilize industry was was the reason why we why we won. Besides automobiles not being made nearly the, you know, same amount in in America, the factories that are making automobiles in America, like couldn’t just swap over to bombers.

Cameron Schiller: 26:13 No.

Ti Morse: 26:13 Cuz like they’re buying a windshield wiper module from Bosch which is like getting their plastic from Mexico and their like motor system from Brazil and they’re like it’s crazy, right? We’ve like optimized the entire world in this web and and it can all shut down. So it’s this assembly stuff, right? And a lot of like, you know, your favorite defense startup, like all those facilities that they’re standing up, they’re all screwdriver factories. They’re all assembly.

Cameron Schiller: 26:51 Who’s gonna make the parts, man?

Ti Morse: 26:53 Like nobody right now. You gotta get to the critical stuff. Like there’s serious crit- and it’s a really hard problem. Problem. Hmm. Like, if you went out and tried to solve the whole thing, like it wouldn’t be pos- I mean, it takes an entire country, right? And China did it with these, with these information share programs. Where you said, oh you know how to do it, like come show us and we’ll, we’ll build a whole factory for you. Um. This actually, like there’s just like a Uno reverse carded recently for-

Cameron Schiller: 27:23 At what was that?

Ti Morse: 27:24 Yeah, there’s a few Chinese factories and like trying to dodge tariffs, set like American firm up in America and showing us Americans how to build.

Cameron Schiller: 27:34 Based? I think?

Ti Morse: 27:36 Super based. Super.

Cameron Schiller: 27:37 Well you’re bringing that American dream from China to America.

Ti Morse: 27:43 You’re bringing it back, man.

Cameron Schiller: 27:44 Right. You’re bringing it back.

Ti Morse: 27:44 Right.

Cameron Schiller: 27:45 We shipped it out, now we’re bringing it back. Imported. Importing.

Ti Morse: 27:47 Imported.

Cameron Schiller: 27:48 Okay, so is the like end-state of Rangeview to take as much of that stack as you possibly can? Everything from just taking like raw ore in one thing and then outputting parts and stuff like that?

Ti Morse: 28:03 From a national security perspective, that’s the most critical thing. And it’s not something that Rangeview can do alone. I mean we need Duren, Teddy, like it’s time to mine, it’s time to refine. There are a lot of elements. There are a lot of- we work in a very narrow class of superalloys here at Rangeview. And we focus on the most critical sectors, right? Getting jet fighters back in the air, drone engines, all the really, really hard-to-do stuff ‘cause that’s where value is and we’re a team of very talented engineers that can deploy against those problems. But there are millions of problems that need the- you know, they need to be solved by other people. And so what we’re trying to do is build tools at Rangeview that might make the general problem of building a factory a little bit easier. That being said, each factory oftentimes has completely different problem sets, right? Like how much you care about your inventory work in progress, just to get like nitty gritty with the details, really matters for some stuff and doesn’t matter at all for other.

Cameron Schiller: 29:11 What does it matter for some stuff? Like what is that some stuff?

Ti Morse: 29:14 Really interesting problem about manufacturing is how you finance it. So, manufacturing has significantly lower risk than other startup types. If your app doesn’t work, you’re not going to go bang on the door of your software engineers and ask them for their salary back, right? Like, if my factory burns down, you know, my millions of dollars of, you know, superalloy, which will take 1500 Celsius, like, will stay in their crate. Sorry, maybe the crate will burn down, but like the metal blocks are still there.

Cameron Schiller: 29:46 Dust them off and use them again.

Ti Morse: 29:49 Probably. They’re, like, literally. So, you probably don’t want to buy those at the same type of capital that you would buy like a software engineer’s salary. So, that’s the first problem is like finance-

Cameron Schiller: 30:00 is just different in this world, right? It’s different like different inputs, different outputs, right? You’re not going to build the same type of company with with with the same considerations. And every manufacturing process, just to kind of get into like why inventory might matter for some more than others is, you know, in sheet metal, quick turn sheet metal fab, like you can have inventory turned in a week. You can buy thousands of pounds and just churn through high throughput. It’s kind of just a few processes. You like take the sheet, cut the sheet, grab it, bend it, maybe insert some stuff into it, package it, out the door. In other forms of manufacturing, the work in progress is like weeks on end. You have to, you know, get the material, prepare in our world the mold to be ready, then you bring them, you know, together, pour molten metal into the mold, cut the, you know, excess metal off the part, heat treat it, x-ray it, NDT whole process, ensure that it, you know, doesn’t have any porosity inside of it and then get it out to the customer and it could be far more than a week. In which case, like you are holding on to your customer’s cash for much longer time. And so it’s a much larger part of your cost basis. So it’s a higher priority stack on ensuring that you’re, you know, getting the prediction of the amount of time that you have to pre-order the material right and and all that. So, yeah, it gets quite complicated because there’s there’s a few thousand decisions you have to you have to make in a in a factory to like really do it right. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it is it is a lot of shared shared problems between between companies and I’m very excited for someone to get a very good manufacturing software stack for kind of all of us to use, whether it’s AS9100 traceability, which is like a compliance thing for aerospace, or even a simple ERP/MES system. All those systems kind of built in America today that are really good are for assembly. So, you know, you’re going to build to what the market is. And in America, the market for factories for the longest time has been assembling stuff.

Ti Morse: 32:18 A screwdriver company.

Cameron Schiller: 32:20 Yeah. So it’s like, I think there’s like literally I think there’s like literally a a screwdriver software company that I just saw.

Ti Morse: 32:31 How big’s that business?

Cameron Schiller: 32:33 I think it just started. I think it’s a I think it’s like a seed.

Ti Morse: 32:37 Startup? That screwdriver software company? Yeah.

Cameron Schiller: 32:39 Yeah. It could be cool.

Ti Morse: 32:42 That’s kind of depressing to be honest.

Cameron Schiller: 32:44 Could be cool. I think there’s some good ideas in it. But the point is, there is no, you know, there is no infrastructure layer. And like China doesn’t just win because of their reduced labor costs.

Ti Morse: 33:00 They’ve crazy infrastructure behind it. My textiles factory that was like doing the final assembly… …sat on top of like a thread factory on top of a button factory on…

Cameron Schiller: 33:11 It was like all in the same city, right?

Ti Morse: 33:12 Literally like you took an elevator.

Cameron Schiller: 33:15 Oh, it was literally in the same building?

Ti Morse: 33:18 Yeah, we were in like an 11-story building, our factory. And you like went downstairs for a different clip type. I had a lunch where we were deciding which clips to use for this piece of like textile, and they were like, ‘Hey, just come downstairs.’ And we just went into their like lobby and like felt them all, like, ‘That one.’ It was unbelievable.

Cameron Schiller: 33:33 Okay.

Ti Morse: 33:33 Yeah.

Cameron Schiller: 33:34 How big of a business did you get your textile business to?

Ti Morse: 33:38 I was… I was a sophomore in high school. This is like we we raised on Kickstarter. All in it was like…

Cameron Schiller: 33:44 Was this Provo?

Ti Morse: 33:46 Yeah.

Cameron Schiller: 33:47 Okay. This backpack business?

Ti Morse: 33:48 Yeah. Not quite a textile business. I mean, textiles are like soft goods. Yeah, textiles are like fabrics.

Cameron Schiller: 33:52 Are they backpacks? Okay. I was thinking like you were just making rugs. And I was like, ‘Wow, this is a story I did not understand.’

Ti Morse: 33:57 No, no, no, soft goods. It’s Provo. This is… this is, um… it ended up growing to like a six-figure business.

Cameron Schiller: 34:03 You got like 30 or 40k on Kickstarter, right? To kick it off?

Ti Morse: 34:06 Yeah. Yeah. We did Bird scooters.

Cameron Schiller: 34:08 What?

Ti Morse: 34:09 We did Bird scooters to pay for all the initial like work to make it happen. Like charging Bird scooters at night.

Cameron Schiller: 34:16 Wait, so how much money did you make from charging Bird scooters? You didn’t make like a buck?

Ti Morse: 34:21 We started the business for like 20k. Yeah.

Cameron Schiller: 34:25 Okay. Where’d you get the 20k from?

Ti Morse: 34:26 Kickstarter. Charging Bird scooters.

Cameron Schiller: 34:27 What? All right. Yeah, grinding. How many, how long did you charge Bird scooters for? Like a year?

Ti Morse: 34:34 Year, half a year. Just in the duration of starting the company. This was back when Bird wanted you to charge their scooters so bad. They were like kicking some really crazy incentives.

Cameron Schiller: 34:45 Straight from San Francisco. That salary was straight… it was probably from like Khosla or something. Tertiary tier-one VC money paying for Bird.

Ti Morse: 34:52 Right.

Cameron Schiller: 34:53 Yeah. You know what they should have done is they should have created this opportunity for like early entrepreneurs to go do this and then just go back range you in the, like, in their future companies. That would have worked out right.

Ti Morse: 35:04 Yeah, it would have.

Cameron Schiller: 35:05 Pour billions on Bird scooters with a hard, you know, a long payoff period, but then you just go back range you at the end of it.

Ti Morse: 35:11 Genius. This was at the same time too the people were throwing them off the pier.

Cameron Schiller: 35:18 Yeah, I know. I was in the… I was in like Europe when they were burning them. Oh man. I was like, ‘How, how are they okay with this?’ I was doing the math on how many rides you’d have to do to like pay for a $2,000 scooter getting torched and I was like, ‘The economics do not make sense here.’

Ti Morse: 35:30 No.

Cameron Schiller: 35:31 It wasn’t great.

Ti Morse: 35:33 No, and the regulatory things, oh my god, getting it… it really just like ‘do it and ask questions later’ and I was like, ‘Wow, this is like a big deal.’

Cameron Schiller: 35:43 Yeah.

Ti Morse: 35:45 But I used that to fund that company. Anyways.

Cameron Schiller: 36:00 That company got me to the China and in China the the the infrastructure was just such a huge deal. And we’re totally missing that layer in in America. Like as an example, equipment. The equipment manufacturing market for you know two zero manufacturing technique. Like the the most popular one right now is CNC machining. It’s like there aren’t that many American CNC machining companies.

Ti Morse: 36:27 Well, is there like any major one?

Cameron Schiller: 36:29 There’s Haas.

Ti Morse: 36:30 Okay.

Cameron Schiller: 36:31 But Haas gets all their castings in China.

Ti Morse: 36:33 Right.

Cameron Schiller: 36:34 And a lot of other parts in China as well.

Ti Morse: 36:37 Is it really American if it’s all based like kind of built in China?

Cameron Schiller: 36:39 But put it this way, like if if China was like for some reason I don’t want America to like have CNC machines, I think it’d be a very big problem for for CNC machines.

Ti Morse: 36:48 Right.

Cameron Schiller: 36:50 So you you know you get a lot of them from Europe and so forth, but it’s really tricky because the money doesn’t stay here.

Ti Morse: 37:03 Mm.

Cameron Schiller: 37:04 And this is like a story that I always told in in automation, like when I was in that industry doing robots and people were scared about robots taking jobs. Like there’s a it’s like an interesting story here. The first one is robots have already won. They’re just in data centers for space and efficiency reasons. And the best robot assistant is a computer programmer. And a whole bunch of people worked really hard to give a computer programmer a ton of leverage. They like command a legion of people at their fingertips. The problem is they can only do information theory. And information gets stale in society over time. Like the optimizations that you can make to like I want a burger, burger shows up at my door, you know, all the other bits that you can do with with this amazing robotic system that we built, communicate with other people, all this stuff, right? So robots are are already here and that’s like the first thing I always tell people. Second is in automation, like it won’t take your job trademark asterisk. So like the robotics industry always says robots won’t take your job because everyone’s freaking out. People freaking out are like you’re literally going to take my job. And the truth is like kind somewhere in the middle where if you look at a farmer, right? Like yes, there are not thousands of people doing farm work and we have abundance and one farmer’s doing the work of a whole bunch of people with this amazing robot that we call a tractor.

Ti Morse: 37:57 Hm.

Cameron Schiller: 37:58 And like no, everyone didn’t like lose their job in the long run, but probably there were a few years where people did this transition. So so long as we can get those people retasked to kind of the new loop that has been created with improved technology, we’re safe. And if we can’t because education isn’t in place or the new technology does not have a you know call it like a skill range that is enveloped by the people that it displaces.

Ti Morse: 38:47 Mm.

Cameron Schiller: 38:48 Or like if the new machine doesn’t have use for the skills people already have, that’s when we have a real problem. You have unemployment.

Ti Morse: 39:02 But the biggest thing is if those farms and tractors aren’t in America anymore, you replace everyone’s job. It’s all gone. This is what globalization was. Like it’s all gone. Like we didn’t just like make the farm more efficient, we just like sent it to China. Chinese olives, Chinese apples.

Cameron Schiller: 39:26 Your American burger was made in China.

Ti Morse: 39:29 Sorry, it was assembled in Carl’s Jr, so it’s all American.

Cameron Schiller: 39:34 It actually might be assembled, maybe cooked in China.

Ti Morse: 39:39 So this is my problem. This is my like core problem with all these factories. It’s like, yes, it’s a highly automated factory, but like, where are those robots coming from? Where is the cash that you’re putting into the factory? Where’s it going? Is it leaving the country? That sucks.

Cameron Schiller: 39:56 Well, isn’t, isn’t another problem that, like, in your case, you’re targeting a market or a few markets that are, like, extremely valuable? How many valuable markets are there?

Ti Morse: 40:07 In manufacturing? Mamma Mia. Manufacturing is a bigger percentage of America’s GDP than all of tech combined.

Cameron Schiller: 40:22 Tech is like 1.4 trillion.

Ti Morse: 40:24 Tech is only 1.4 trillion dollars? What are they saying tech is?

Cameron Schiller: 40:26 What are they saying tech is?

Ti Morse: 40:27 And manufacturing is 2.3. Apple’s doing… they’re saying tech, the American tech sector… with a worthy of a roughly 1.6 trillion and accounting for nearly 2 trillion of US dollars in the country’s GDP.

Cameron Schiller: 40:40 In this year? Like last year?

Ti Morse: 40:42 Yeah. The point is, in America, the manufacturing sector is like a massive opportunity. It’s insane. And I think for folks looking, at least from the VC side at this new opportunity, like, they see manufacturing startup A and B, and they might kind of be competitive because they think it’s all like Fintech or crypto.

Cameron Schiller: 40:59 Where one person wins, the other guy loses.

Ti Morse: 41:03 Where it’s just another segment, right? And the truth is, like, no. It is bigger than the entire world that you have optimized in before inside of technology, right? Like, an injection molding startup and a machining startup are just as similar as a Fintech startup and a healthcare startup. Like, yes, they are both startups, but they are not competitive. Right? Like… So, so what defines something in a market is its production capabilities. There’s no such thing as a manufacturing technology that can do it all. Like, there’s actually no such thing as a manufacturing technology which can, like, generalize a bunch of specific things that have happened. It’s a very good way to know if someone’s, like, not done enough manufacturing if they’re like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to build the machine that’ll, like, delete all of these hyper-specific, you know, forms of manufacturing.’

Cameron Schiller: 42:00 And the reason why I say that is because if you look over time, we’ve just created more manufacturing technologies. We’ve just created more, and they’re more specific and they’re better at doing these very, very, very tightly zoned types of parts. In manufacturing, the way the world works is a designer chooses the cheapest way to achieve his part specifications. Sometimes if he’s smart, he’ll design to known processes that’s cheap so those specifications make the part and the whole thing cheaper. That’s design for manufacturability.

Ti Morse: 42:26 Simple.

Cameron Schiller: 42:27 Yeah, this is like what that world is. But this means that you really compete from an efficiency, which ultimately is a cost basis with things that are like honed to very specific things. Like we have created entire industries on how to effectively make screws, right? And if someone says like, ‘I’m going to metal 3D print a screw because I can make all the different screw sizes and types,’ it’s like for the price of, you know, that printer, I could fill this room with every single shape and size of screw that exists times a thousand. It’s unbelievable just how these things scale over time, right? Like manufacturing is a very interesting world and specificity like often wins. And that’s okay. And that’s a huge market oftentimes. Like manufacturing is a massive pie slice. There’s a lot to improve here. The thing that I would like is, you know, not American firms competing with American firms, but American firms competing with Chinese firms or some overseas firms. This is what we need to do. If technology and automation and labor decoupling is the path forward, then it actually doesn’t matter where it is, right? It doesn’t have to be in a place with cheap labor. It has to be in a place with good infrastructure and a place that wants to get all the money associated with putting those factories in. And so I advocate both those things should be in America. But this means that we have to compete fairly with China. And today we do not compete fairly with China. China subsidizes parts, take the most advanced manufacturing technology in America for making metal parts, China can make that part for cheaper than that American firm can get electricity and the raw goods.

Ti Morse: 44:29 So is this one of those things where you just have to go to DC to basically talk with the US government to make it reasonably fair or competitive against what China’s doing?

Cameron Schiller: 44:41 That’s not something I can do. I think it’s something that has to become a national priority. I think that will happen in two ways. The first is something crazy happens and we need to do this immediately. And I think the second one is if the country decides that they want to be very serious about bringing back manufacturing jobs. Yeah. But even if the like the the prior one or whatever the first one happens, um, it’s not something that can be turned on overnight, right? Like the the tribal knowledge doesn’t exist.

Ti Morse: 45:12 The two big problems are workforce and equipment lead times. So workforce: the tribal knowledge doesn’t exist, but technology can solve that by transcribing it into sensors and logic. So, you know, you go to the people who know how to make it today and the apprentices that are learning how to make things, you can package all of that—it’s doable—you can package all of that into a computer that says, ‘I’ve seen this before, here’s how to perform this operation.’ And if you’re good enough, you can actualize the equipment to do the operation directly with the oversight of a of a human. And this argument is being made by a few uh manufacturing startups, and it’s a pretty good argument. The second problem is equipment lead times. This is—this is critical. Um, you can’t just double the size of a of a factory the overnight. The lead times that we deal with in our world are over 16 months for critical pieces of componentry. You could have the whole factory built and not have this one piece of equipment, and it you can’t do anything.

Cameron Schiller: 46:36 Well Harris talked about like the stamping press that they built for like 200k was I think it was going to be like a 16 or 18 month lead time and like two million dollars.

Ti Morse: 46:46 Yep. Sounds about right. Yeah, and probably not from America.

Cameron Schiller: 46:52 No. I assume.

Ti Morse: 46:53 Yeah. Some of them aren’t. And those American firms are fantastic, but they’re just as tech-forward as the factories that they served before. So, the highest tech equipment in—the highest tech and quickest lead time equipment you can get in America right now is of course from where they’re building all the factories every day, which is China. So the highest performance manufacturing equipment you can get, it’s—it’s all in China.

Cameron Schiller: 47:18 So if there was like if you could wave a magic wand and rapidly or like change the focus of a whole bunch of people in the US today toward one thing, what would that be?

Ti Morse: 47:34 Yeah if I—if I could wave a magic wand, I’d have a lot more people making a lot more parts. Like just making stuff. Pipes, boxes, hangers, I-beams—like all the stuff you see around you today. I mean, look in the room that you’re around right now. Like what percentage of that room was made by people in your community? You actually know for this building?

Cameron Schiller: 48:00 We’re in a building from the 60s, man. This whole place is American as hell.

Ti Morse: 48:04 But let’s sit around American, man. You can feel it in the air. Now you go to like a modern apartment and it’s like, it’s over. Like there’s nothing, literally nothing that you can put your life on the line on that is now made in America. China’s living our American dream.

Cameron Schiller: 48:18 And with it the personal responsibility.

Ti Morse: 48:21 What?

Cameron Schiller: 48:22 Yeah. Hmm.

Ti Morse: 48:24 How are you gonna build stuff, you know? Like this is a core problem and I wanted to go work on Starship and like one of the guys that ran manufacturing at the time, like chatted with us about it and once Starship is designed and like ready to go, the problem of making a thousand of those things is unbelievable.

Cameron Schiller: 48:46 Yeah. SpaceX had it so bad they built their own foundry. Yeah.

Ti Morse: 48:52 They’re a rocket company that had to build their own foundry. That’s ridiculous. You know, Chinese rocket maker doesn’t have to go make his own bolt manufacturer and his own… SpaceX has to do all of their own stuff because the country isn’t supporting them. So if you’re not Elon Musk, like how are you gonna build it, man? We’re basically down bad.

Cameron Schiller: 49:13 You have to do this for all of the other people who want to make something in this country, right? Like let’s bring machine shops back to around every corner, right? But you can’t just do that with technology. There’s no like AI robotics magic wand that’s like we’re just gonna do, you know, process better using AI. It won’t happen.

Ti Morse: 49:36 I’m going to use Devin.

Cameron Schiller: 49:38 Outsource it to Devin.

Ti Morse: 49:39 ChatGPT, but for factories.

Cameron Schiller: 49:41 Exactly. And that won’t happen for a whole bunch of reasons. In part because AI works really well on huge datasets and on information theory. Like AI’s really good in the worlds that it understands well. Those worlds have a lot of data, right?

Ti Morse: 49:59 Like if you go tell an AI to, you know, anodize parts. The act of anodizing parts, right? You like take this metal part, you like put it in acid bath, another bath, out the door. Like you gotta say, you know, what percentage… 100% of the value of ChatGPT is giving you information. Very little percentage of the value of anodizing parts is giving you information.

Cameron Schiller: 50:32 Like okay you give me like schedule it a little bit better and maybe figure out how much it costs and…

Ti Morse: 50:40 But mostly it’s just putting it from bath into bath into bath.

Cameron Schiller: 50:43 There’s like the bathing, there’s, you know, this is where Figure comes in.

Ti Morse: 50:46 Good point. We’re gonna use Figure for this.

Cameron Schiller: 50:48 That’s right. You get to a humanoid and the humanoid flaps his wings and flies away with the anodization baths.

Ti Morse: 50:56 You spent three years and I know that you when we talked last time you were like grinding.

Cameron Schiller: 51:00 You’d go to school, you’d get home, and then you’d like grind in the garage or whatever for three-four hours.

Ti Morse: 51:06 Yep.

Cameron Schiller: 51:07 Something like that.

Ti Morse: 51:08 Yep.

Cameron Schiller: 51:08 You did that for three years.

Ti Morse: 51:09 Yep. Yes, so in high school, robotics was super serious. I mean we did VEX and FIRST Robotics, which are two fantastic robotics programs in America. And they taught you quick iteration, they taught you first principles, building stuff with your hands. And we would work in the garage for… I mean, I think it’s the great American builder’s story. It’s like a bunch of wrenches in a garage and into 2:00 AM, 3:00 AM every night building robots. And it was super competitive. When you look at the next generation of builders that are coming out of the world right now, look no further than some of these robotics education programs. So you have America with FIRST and VEX Robotics and BattleBots later into great engineers. And in China you have DJI RoboMasters, which is sponsored by the state and is run by DJI and they put very talented engineers on a pedestal. I mean, you’re a quarterback in China if you can build a fantastic robot. And that’s been happening for years. You can go look at DJI RoboMasters on YouTube. And what it does is it aligns people with the problems of the country, which is making stuff that matters. And China’s set up to make stuff that matters. I mean, the people are being celebrated for building fantastic robots sponsored by the state. Like all the way from what’s being built today to the next generation of people that are being built tomorrow. It’s all queued up. So I think it’s going to be really challenging for America in the next few years and we should invest a lot into education today.

Cameron Schiller: 52:59 So let’s talk about this new facility. Massive place. How big is it relative to your old place?

Ti Morse: 53:20 This is 15 times larger. So we will be expanding our production capacity by 15 times. And the last facility was to prove our novel technology in qualification against production contracts. And this facility is to scale against those production contracts. So we are looking at, you know, multiple decade-long production contracts that are, you know, each worth tens of millions of dollars for the purpose of deploying American steel in American engines and structurals, you know, on this land. And what’s so special about this facility is that it was a huge part of the Space Shuttle program, the Titan 4 rocket program. The heritage is here. Everything around here is is all American. And it’s kind of a place where you can feel it in the air. It’s super special. And uh and we’re we’re lucky to call it home.

Cameron Schiller: 54:12 It’s much bigger. You already like 3x over using the other one, so it’s really only like 5x what you’re… it’s packed. Yeah, it’s it’s pretty big. Uh but I know it’s a little bit of a fixer-upper. What is what has like been the retrofit job from the shuttle program to now? What needs to be done?

Ti Morse: 54:28 Yeah, it’s been incredible. And I mean it’s part of what what we’re showing, which is that you can take American industrial assets that have been forgotten and convert them into the next generation of of American manufacturing greatness. So, it’s a full retrofit, right? It’s environmental controls, it’s making it a place that people want to work in. Half the problem in manufacturing is people just don’t want to work in factories. They aren’t inspiring places. So, this is going to be an incredibly inspiring place to work. And it will be configured for all of the, you know, novel processes that we operate. We operate lithography in house, we literally use light to shape sand. Um you can’t do that in, you know, a traditional old facility. You have to have clean rooms and all that. So, that’s all being retrofitted inside of here in a really modern way.

Cameron Schiller: 55:29 So, from working on robotics for like three years during high school… yeah… is there anything that you kind of carried through those years to what you’re doing at Rangeview right now?

Ti Morse: 55:39 Yeah. Yeah, I mean a ton of stuff. The way that you think about a robot is so different. Like most people think about robot arms and humanoids and all the stuff we keep talking about. The truth is, like, one of the best robots in the world, in the physical world today, is a dishwasher. Dishwashers are all over the place and they’re not that expensive. Someone figured out that you can like make a black box where a human does the edge cases and the rest of the system figures itself out. But if we tried to wash dishes the way that we’re building robotic solutions for industry today, it would be two robot arms and a camera system and you’d, you know, snap a plate and pay itself back never in like, you know, a hundred years. So, we have to rethink from first principles what it means to automate something and put the humans in the in the, you know, most expensive problems. The problems that are changing every time, you know, you’re you’re losing index, all this stuff. So, a factory is a bunch of operations in series that are measured in their efficiency, which ultimately creates the the price of a part. And so there’s tons of automation opportunities and you have to be really smart about what type of automation you put somewhere. So our factories don’t have a lot of robot arms everywhere. Robot arms are kind of they kind of exist, if you look at a robot arm, it’s you know one’s shaped the way your arm is. They have all the joints in the same place and everything because they’re designed to work within human environments. They’re designed time to replace a human worker.

Cameron Schiller: 57:04 And this is your like big gripe with like the humanoids in general. It’s not that we shouldn’t have way, way more robots doing a whole bunch of stuff. It’s just the fact that like this one form factor doesn’t make sense for most applications.

Ti Morse: 57:15 Yeah. I mean, say that like it’s all going to come down to efficiencies. If AGI gets there and humanoids are fantastic at stuff, the cost function won’t support generalized robotics. It’s just going to be more efficient to have robots, which are going to be 100 to 1000 times cheaper, doing very specialized tasks. If you’ve got to move a block from point A to point B as fast as possible, it turns out that a conveyor belt is a lot, yes, less general, but a lot cheaper and a lot higher throughput than a humanoid. And so kind of at the limit, you’re not going to have these generalized solutions doing everything. You’re going to have this break over between specialized and general solutions. And for the vast majority of things that happen, specialized solutions will, will win. So our factory is a very special set of inputs and outputs that allows us to be very efficient. But it is coming from a narrow band of, of production, right? We, we produce parts within a certain size. We produce parts within a certain alloy class. If you want stuff outside of that, you can go other places, but we’re going to be world class at making stuff within our box.

Cameron Schiller: 58:14 How’d you decide like which box to put yourself in?

Ti Morse: 58:16 You do a market analysis and a technology analysis. So you work to understand the constraints of the technology. Each technological limit will be set by some improvement curve. And the improvement curve will kind of look like a square root of X, you know, where it trails off. Initial improvements are cheap. Tail end improvements are expensive. And then markets will just be kind of like what value does stuff bring to humans in the world, right? Making trinkets like forks aren’t really that useful. They’re worth a few cents or, or dollars. And then making, you know, blades for an engine that produces power for an entire neighborhood tend to be worth a lot. So you overlap those two worlds and identify what capability set is both cheapest to build and most valuable to the world.

Cameron Schiller: 59:30 Yeah. Well, I, I would actually like to spend a little bit of time on your design philosophy because the other office, like it’s beautiful and it’s a great space to be in. And not only that, when I wear like your merch, people every single time, people are mentioning it or commenting on it every single time. When I wore the, the fighter jet thing, the ACE. Yeah, yeah. 100% at least once when I would wear it. And I wore it like 20 times.

Ti Morse: 1:00:00 Powerful. It was very interesting. So what’s kind of like your design philosophy for creating beautiful spaces and-

Cameron Schiller: 1:00:06 I like design. I’m a creative person. And I think it matters. Design matters. It’s subconscious I think for most technical folks, but people like the- the Disney Imagineering group are world-class at engineering emotions. And I think a lot of stuff is downstream of emotions. It’s like one of the philosophies I have. So, you know, if you can improve the efficiency of your- your team by 1%, like that’s worth so much to the business and a few plants here and there and- it really depends what level of design. You can hire a- interior designer to make a place look professional, but it’s- it doesn’t feel emotional. It doesn’t elicit- I really like beautiful spaces. And beautiful spaces aren’t designed by some algorithm. It’s- it’s a feeling that someone has. And it’s- like a real labor of love to- to make that happen. Like there’s a bit of a person inside of what you see there. And there’s some really remarkable places that you go to and you just feel it. And it’s going to be critical that the- that the next manufacturing buildings inside America aren’t old and look like they’re going to eat you apart with rust and-

Ti Morse: 1:01:29 They need to be like inspiring.

Cameron Schiller: 1:01:31 Yeah, they need to be inspiring. They need to look like Meccas. They need to look like what they are, which is the future for society.

Ti Morse: 1:01:37 Have you ever played Factorio?

Cameron Schiller: 1:01:39 Yes. I- I love Factorio. I- I play- I actually play real-life Factorio. Well, that’s what I was thinking. I play real-life Factorio.

Ti Morse: 1:01:46 Have you played actual Factorio?

Cameron Schiller: 1:01:47 Of course. Hundreds of hours.

Ti Morse: 1:01:49 How many hours do you have in Factorio?

Cameron Schiller: 1:01:51 Not nearly as much as Thomas. Really? There’s a- there’s a guy on our team, Thomas. Mm-hmm. Thomas is like- he two-screens Factorio. One screen is the game. The other screen is his Excel calculator for the ideal throughputs. Pre-blueprints for every assembly. Like, in the forms for doing all of the, like, super high-performance level Factorio, like nth optimization stuff. It’s a- it’s a great video game. I mean, it teaches you how to build a factory. It’s just fantastic. Quick iteration loop, you know. Yeah. It’s good.

Ti Morse: 1:02:25 So I know that you mentioned a while ago that basically you could look or you could understand a society through their cars, like through history and stuff. Tell me about that.

Cameron Schiller: 1:02:37 Yeah. Uh, actually a great question. Something I haven’t been asked I think publicly before. I like cars a lot. Um, I’ve always liked cars. I think cars are really hard to build. Like you mentioned this earlier in the- in the podcast. It’s like there were a lot of people building cars and cars have gotten increasingly complex over time. They’re electrical-mechanical systems. They’re- they’re very hard to finance. They’re- there’s a lot of policy-

Ti Morse: 1:03:00 associated with making them, with emissions now and so forth. They’re really, you know, other than planes and things, they’re some of the hardest things. Maybe even harder in some cases than planes because of the order quantities. You just have to make so much of one thing. And a car for many people is a very big purchase decision. For people early in life, it’s one of the biggest purchase decisions that they make. So they’re making a compromise between a whole bunch of things and you can generally tell a lot about a person, if they care about cars, by what car they choose to care about. If they don’t care about cars then it’s, you know, it’s not really an indicator. But I generally like to think that’s the case. And at a higher societal level, you can see this over time. Like what people care about, as the oil embargoes came in and shortages years ago, you’ll see preferences for, you know, gas guzzling or not so gas guzzling things. In America, you had the Mustang. When the Mustang came out, it was a huge deal. And all this stuff is designed for kind of the state of the time. So you can look at some of the most… and it’s not all cars. There’s like a certain subset of cars which really tell stories. They’re generally made by really passionate groups of small people inside of the company. Those are really special cars.

Cameron Schiller: 1:04:29 Are there any specific cars in your mind that kind of fit this criteria?

Ti Morse: 1:04:31 Yeah, from a manufacturing standpoint, the moment the F-150 went from steel to aluminum was a huge deal. BMW when they went carbon fiber, like directional weave carbon fiber all on the whole chassis. They took the Boeing 787 team. The Dodge Viper was a really big deal. Dodge was trying to prove itself in the world that it was more than a minivan maker, although at the time the minivan was also like a very innovative thing that came out. It’s weird to say. Like the Caravans and everything before it. So Dodge put together a parts bin car. Like literally the turn signals are off of, you know, this and that and it was a truck engine that they added two cylinders to and… so it was a Bob Lutz was the guy that did it. And what he did was like he worked super hard on this very difficult problem to prove that that company and those people were worth something in the world. And this has happened kind of across time. I mean, Lotus as a company has done remarkable stuff. But it’s not even just one brand, right? It’s very specific moments in time and people working on specific projects and cars inside of those moments. And it’s a really cool interest because people… you can connect over cars and people love them for all different reasons, right? They can be beautiful, you can take care of them a lot for people that want to do that, you can race them. not care about the paint at all. You work on them yourself. Um, it’s a- it’s kind of a big canvas for people’s interests that are really passionate about things. And that’s something that I personally love. I love when people are really passionate about stuff.

Cameron Schiller: 1:06:13 What is- what have your, like, car choices been since you were a teenager, kind of said about you?

Ti Morse: 1:06:18 Yeah. Um, that I like GTIs. Like I think the Volkswagen GTI is like one of the best cars. Anytime someone asks for a car, before they even tell me what they care about, the GTI is the answer.

Cameron Schiller: 1:06:30 Right.

Ti Morse: 1:06:31 It’s- it’s the perfect people’s car. Um.

Cameron Schiller: 1:06:32 What makes it so special?

Ti Morse: 1:06:33 It’s- it’s perfect. It’s- um, it’s- the seating position is great. Uh, it’s got fantastic chassis dynamics. It is front wheel drive, but it’s not that bad. A lot of car people will say they want, you know, rear wheel drive, and they just truly haven’t driven a great front wheel drive car before. Um, it’s simple, a lot of the kind of older ones I’m thinking of, like pre-2017 GTIs. And it’s super practical. It’s got tons of space in it. It’s got all the stuff you could you could want in a car.

Cameron Schiller: 1:07:03 But the back seat of a GTI is like a far more comfortable place to be in than you know like the back seat of some of these SUVs that America is so attached to right now.

Ti Morse: 1:07:13 The SUV craze in America, just to go on like a little tangent, is awful. It’s ruining the country. We need- we need to go back to wagons. Wagon superiority. The wagon. Oh my god. Europe’s got it right.

Cameron Schiller: 1:07:28 Really?

Ti Morse: 1:07:29 Manual wagons.

Cameron Schiller: 1:07:31 You’re saying Europe is mogging America?

Ti Morse: 1:07:33 Yeah, 100% on cars.

Cameron Schiller: 1:07:37 Why?

Ti Morse: 1:07:38 Uh, they- it’s like a very ego-driven thing in America. You got to sit up high, you know? So you have all these people driving like G-Wagons and and these other really sit-up-high type situations. You don’t really need to. A lot of these SUVs have like similar interior space, which is an argument people make all the time for big cars. Similar interior space to like lower sitting cars that have- like GTIs got a ton of interior space and it’s a small car. It’s just the- you know you lift it up a lot, you drop the- the roof line a lot, and you end up cutting a lot of usable space inside all these cars. So it’s kind of an ego-driven thing sometimes. Um.

Cameron Schiller: 1:08:18 But yeah the GTI is a great recommendation.

Ti Morse: 1:08:22 I normally tell everybody like that is- that’s the thing. And then beyond that, if you want to get more specific, you know, you can ask people like what exactly are you looking for,

Cameron Schiller: 1:08:30 What kind of relationship you looking to have with your car?

Ti Morse: 1:08:34 The thing for me is I like the way cars drive. I’m like a- I’ve always liked mechanical engineering. And cars are one of the most like complex mechanical things that you’re going to work with and spend time with every day. So if you care to feel it, you can totally do that. Like you can understand how the tires are releasing as you go around a turn or you know how the gears are shifting. You just have to pay attention and you’ll end up really caring a lot about how mechanical systems work.

Cameron Schiller: 1:09:00 as you can have that relationship with a with a car. A lot of people at at Range are car people in fact we have a we have a car lift going in in our employee lounge so you can

Ti Morse: 1:09:04 Like in the new building?

Cameron Schiller: 1:09:05 Yes, like literally right there.

Ti Morse: 1:09:06 Okay.

Cameron Schiller: 1:09:07 Yeah, there is literally gonna be a car lift so people can work on their cars here.

Ti Morse: 1:09:08 Insane.

Cameron Schiller: 1:09:09 Yeah.

Ti Morse: 1:09:10 That’s very based.

Cameron Schiller: 1:09:11 We try.

Ti Morse: 1:09:12 Is it uh you don’t have any hiring policies that where you’re just discriminating against people without good car taste, right?

Cameron Schiller: 1:09:14 No, of course not. No, no, of course not.

Ti Morse: 1:09:15 Okay. All right, let’s end it on uh what’s the hardest thing you’ve overcome?

Cameron Schiller: 1:09:16 I was very uncertain about dropping out of college. It was a big pipeline and I was on track to go into good schools and getting a you know, getting a good certain path to a good job. And it felt like there was something wrong with that path for me. I think the state of college is changing in America quite rapidly. And I felt the beginning of that. And I had much higher ambitions for the impact that I would have on the world and had those ambitions with a with a focus on doing it soon. I was, you know, urgently trying to do something that mattered in the world and I felt like that wasn’t happening at at college. At the same time, it was all lined up. It’s like, if you just do these things, you’ll be fine. I think there’s no better time to drop out of college if you know that what you want to do is more likely to be taught to you outside of school than inside of school. I don’t think that’s the case for everything. But it ended up being harder for me than I thought. But after doing it and connecting with a bunch of other folks living a similar life to me, I felt significantly less lonely in in the decision that I made. And I think it was maybe the initial loneliness that was difficult for me to experience. Feeling like you’ve made the correct decision for yourself but the world disagrees with you is not a comfortable feeling.

Ti Morse: 1:09:33 How much did you work out during that time?

Cameron Schiller: 1:09:34 It’s interesting that you say that. It was one of the like biggest things that kept me kept me together I think is being like two to three hours in the gym every day. So like very very very hardcore. Um eating extremely well. Having a gym was lot of clarity in thought. And since then, starting the company has not been helpful for my for my gym regimen. I think I’m doing probably half that. It was a really big deal. I think going to the gym’s a really, really big deal for for me and a lot of my other founder friends.

Ti Morse: 1:12:06 Kind of like helps you survive a little bit?

Cameron Schiller: 1:12:08 Yeah. Yeah, for sure.