Background

Questions

1. What is RRAI and what inspired you to join the company?
2. You started your career in defense tech at Anduril. What were the critical elements of Anduril’s success in selling to the Pentagon as a startup founded by someone who was from the VR/gaming space?
3. Can you give us a high-level breakdown of how a new defense technology gets from the R&D stage to being deployed in the real world?
4. There seem to be roughly two different business models that modern defense startups are using to innovate around the cost-plus contract—the SpaceX/Relativity Space approach of heavy vertical integration, and the Anduril platform approach. Does that map to reality in your experience? How might you position it? Where does RRAI fit?
5. Was there a particular strategy to the southern border surveillance as the introductory product or the wedge or was that incidental?
6. With RRAI moving toward a multi-product approach, does it imply a shift towards doing products vs. research? Does it have anything to do with larger shifts in the space that maybe Anduril and SpaceX helped pave the way for startups to more easily sell into the government, DoD, etc.?
7. Given the long timelines in contracting and the capital requirements of doing R&D upfront, how do companies in this space manage the capital risk involved in building a product before selling it?
8. Can you talk about how the business models of companies like Anduril and SpaceX have changed how the government thinks about procurement and incentives? Where are traditional contractors threatened? Where are they most durable given this shift?
9. Can you talk about margins in the defense contracting world? Is there a world where companies like Anduril can get to 40-50% margins selling into the government—particularly selling recurring software subscriptions—or does that require, for instance, selling into commercial use cases as well?
10. At RRAI, what problems have you had to solve in terms of sourcing chips, cameras, radar, LiDAR, sensors, and other components? Is there an edge to be gained through differentiated sourcing tactics or customization? We have seen autonomy companies seeking cost/scale advantages by optimizing systems to run through using consumer-grade chips/components. Or, alternately, companies using a lot of custom components.
11. Can you talk about the opposed approaches of 1) vertical-specific autonomy companies like Outrider (logistics) and Kodiak (trucking), and 2) horizontal autonomy companies like RRAI (logistics + trucking + defense + other commercial use cases) and Shield AI (software for drones + jets)? What are the benefits and trade-offs of each approach?
12. How have more recent advances in AI changed the autonomy landscape in helping solve problems related to the feasibility and economics of deploying these systems commercially? For example, companies using multimodal LLMs to improve autonomous navigation, especially with regard to labeling and reasoning around edge cases (Ghost Autonomy).
13. If RRAI succeeds, what does the world look like in 15 years? How are things different?