Founder of @ValstadShip. We're building the machine that builds the ships.
Austin, TX
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We're hiring an Operations Lead!
Come help us change the way ships get built in America.
valstad.com/careers/operatio…
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The best days in a hardware startup start out despondent, but end with a major breakthrough.
The emotional rollercoaster is oddly addictive.
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Four samples cut, etched, inspected - PASS.
Turns out you can just buy a $6 bottle of Naval Jelly and etch it yourself rather than pay hundreds to a testing lab.
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Weld procedure qualification day.
When you’re building mission-critical structures like ships, you have to prove you can produce high-quality welds.
Visual inspection, break test, and macro-etch testing, human and robotic welds.
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Some great hires coming onboard that will massively upgrade our welding engineering team.
First order of business: free welding training, with job offers for the best students. Robotic and traditional.
We're going to weld so many frickin' pieces of metal together.
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This? Oh nothing, just a precisely machined nest for a spherical retroreflector used in hyper-accurate laser interferometry.
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…unless you start a moat-building company.
Then the moat is your moats.
"Moats" are the most BS thing in startups.
No such thing exists when you start. Google, Apple, Meta can always "just build it".
Defensibility is built in increments.
Small, immensely focused teams outpace the biggest companies on earth.
Investors, get over the moat obsession.
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Won't be participating this time around (cooking on something for a customer), but excited to see Austin's deep tech ecosystem exploding!
“The future is actually starting to happen.”
Technologies that spent decades in sci-fi are finally starting to show up as real products and companies.
@Andercot is unusually well positioned to see that shift. He went from designing superconducting magnets for fusion to launching Deep Tech Week.
Our conversation started with Austin DTW, which kicks off next week, but we went down the rabbit hole into a bigger question. What has to happen for science fiction to become real and ordinary?
Agenda
0:00 Austin’s takeoff and cowboy futurism
10:00 Where physics meets economics
17:12 Industry, AI and abundant energy
28:18 The geography of deep tech
33:29 Underwriting hard tech
39:21 Ambition and the sci-fi future
46:47 Austin’s factories and permission
53:53 Orbit, beamlines and what comes next
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Dumb mass alone is rarely decisive in combat.
Continuing to invest heavily in kinetic & EW anti-drone systems can quickly neutralize any production advantage China might have here.
We don’t need to play by China’s rules.
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Valstad is so vertically integrated that we now have our own oxygen. This often saves important time that would otherwise be spent asphyxiating.
Boom is so vertically integrated we now have our own truck. This often saves important time getting a needed item faster than vendors and couriers can deliver
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Have yet to a supplier that has:
a) Plate leveling machine
b) Large format laser cutting table
c) Plate preservation line (blast & prime)
d) 2000T+ press brake (40’+)
For 10x40’ plate up to 1.5” thick, in one building.
Am I gonna have to drop $10M to make this happen?
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Accuracy testing.
Right now we’re able to compensate for weld distortion using only a single sensor.
Still slower than we’d like, so we’re already working on a multi-sensor approach that will speed things up significantly, although this is good enough that we can start ramping production while we continue to iterate.
Tons of little details required to get this right.
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