Hey, it's Greg

This week's guest has shipped millions of consumer products across four industries, spent years inside Chinese factories, and joined one of the most well-known defense startups as an early employee.

Now he's asking a question most of the industry hasn't: what if the thing we should be engineering first is the factory itself? That conversation is below.

What's one part of your supply chain that keeps you up at night? Hit reply. I get back to every one.

In this week's edition:

I sat down with Eric Hostetler, CEO and co-founder of Volund Manufacturing, for a conversation about what happens when you bring a consumer goods mindset to one of the country's most urgent industrial challenges: producing reliable defense hardware at scale.

At Volund, Eric and his team are building vertically integrated propulsion manufacturing for low-cost, attritable drones and other unmanned systems. Rather than treating the engine as the only innovation, the entire factory, from CNC machining and welding to heat treatment, metrology, and quality systems, is designed as one system from day one.

A few things that stood out:

• The whole pie matters. Too many companies over-optimize a single slice of their cost structure, whether AI for design or robotics for touch labor, without looking at how material costs, cycle time, overhead, and quality systems all interact.
• Each manufacturing cell is its own factory. Volund's cells handle production, quality control, and scrap decisions internally, catching out-of-spec parts in about 30 seconds. Scaling becomes closer to copy-paste than redesign.
• The supply chain gaps are stark. Bearings take 16 weeks from a U.S. manufacturer, longer than it takes to build every other part of a jet engine twice over. Investment casting tooling runs $400,000 domestically versus $3,000 in China.
• Parts of the industrial base may need to be replaced. Eighty percent of U.S. CNC shops have ten employees or fewer, with aging owners unequipped for CMMC cybersecurity requirements or 10x production scaling.
• $12M seed round closed, co-led by Root Ventures, Squadra Ventures, and Marlin Spike, funding two engine sizes through low-rate initial production.

Worth the full listen if you are building in defense tech, propulsion, or advanced manufacturing. 

A few active searches that might be relevant to you or someone in your network:

Staff/Principal Automation & Controls Engineer | Los Angeles, CA

An advanced manufacturing company building next-generation production systems. Broad, hands-on controls role spanning PLC programming (IEC 61131-3 Structured Text), industrial electrical systems, machine safety, and automation architecture from early concept through commissioning. 7+ years experience. Staff: $148K to $204K / Principal: $171K to $236K base.

Manufacturing Development Engineer | Los Angeles, CA

Own the translation of complex machine technology from development into repeatable, scalable manufacturing. Highly hands-on: build, integration, commissioning, qualification, and production handoff of complex electromechanical capital equipment. 5 to 10 years experience. Aerospace, semiconductor equipment, or additive manufacturing background is a strong fit.

Senior Wireless Communications Engineer | Remote

A strategic-growth-stage autonomous systems company deploying ML models across air, ground, and maritime platforms. Architect and maintain a hybrid multi-layer mesh at LAN/MAN scale, implement custom routing in C++/Python, and run field demos with hundreds of robots. 5+ years wireless/mesh. DoD clearance eligibility required.

Know someone? Reply to this email and send them our way.

I'll be at FUSE San Francisco on November 19 at Foundry SF. It's a one-day, single-track conference from Point One Navigation focused on location technology for Physical AI, specifically the system design patterns engineers have used to ship autonomous systems at scale.

The speaker lineup includes Brian Schimpf (co-founder and CEO, Anduril), Sven Strohband and Kanu Gulati (Khosla Ventures), Adrian Macneil (co-founder and CEO, Foxglove), Satya Mallick (CEO, OpenCV), Ali Agha (co-founder and CEO, FieldAI), and Adam Grosser (UP.Partners). No product keynotes, just engineering-focused talks and conversation.

If you're going, come say hi.

Robotics investments reach $4.9B in August 2026 (The Robot Report)
One month, 162 transactions. Unitree's $905M IPO and XPENG Robotics' $900M Series A led the way. Robotics has now raised roughly $18.8B year-to-date, already topping the prior best full year with four months on the calendar.

Planted raises $31.8M to build solar projects with robots (Business Wire)
Planted turns power plant construction into a manufacturing problem: planning software, terrain-following arrays, and field robotics in one system. Deployed 10 MW in 2025, targeting 100 MW in 2026. Piva Capital and RA Capital co-led, with Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Google, and Khosla participating.

Boeing-Anduril team advances in Army interceptor competition (Breaking Defense)
The Army moved Boeing-Anduril and Lockheed Martin into Phase 2 of the IFPC Increment 2 second interceptor program, eliminating Rafael. The weapon is a compact midrange interceptor for cruise missiles and drones, with Anduril supplying the solid rocket motor from its own factory in Mississippi.

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