The Founders Who Left Tesla to Rebuild America | a16z

The US is 50 years behind on critical minerals supply.

We are too slow at designing, building, and ramping up new minerals capacity, even after we have license to operate.

Even though there's so much innovation happening at the edge of the grid, on the other side of the wire, there's really been no change.

You both came out of Tesla.

What does the Tesla model give you that a traditional industrial company doesn't have?

The belief that you can innovate on systems that are old and archaic.

If the outcome is worth it, Tesla will fight through the challenges of getting to that outcome.

We're making a big bet on autonomy in refineries where we use reinforced from learning to actually remove humans from the loop in determining how refineries operate.

The world's leading producer of silicon carbide, which is a key power semiconductor, is based here in the US.

And so we should be leveraging the applications of that technology here first, manufacturing here at home.

And if we don't—

Now, it's tempting to talk about the AI race as a competition of models and chips, but the truth is that AI dominance and reindustrialization more broadly are physical projects.

They are energy projects.

They are mining and refining projects.

They are manufacturing projects.

They are grid-scale projects.

Every breakthrough model, new factory, and autonomous system that we'll talk about here today has a real-world requirement underneath it.

Materials, energy, and the ability to move electricity where it's needed, when it's needed.

We increasingly hear concerns that AI will put an undue strain on an already faltering grid, will demand more energy than we can give, more buildout than we can keep up with.

And in many ways, these are fair concerns.

But rather than taking this at face value and putting our pencils down on progress, we see this as a call to action, an opportunity.

We can do great things in this country.

We have rallied around national projects before, accomplished things few dreamed possible.

It's possible, and we can do so again.

This is the next chapter of American dynamism.

If we want to rebuild the industrial backbone of the United States, we have to rethink the entire stack from critical minerals to energy generation to transmission to how we build and

interconnect new infrastructure at the speed that it's needed.

This next conversation brings together two incredible entrepreneurs building across that stack to talk about what it will take to do just that.

Join me in welcoming co-founder and CEO of Mariana Minerals, Turner Caldwell, and founder and CEO of Heron Power, Drew Baglino.

We'll spend a lot more time in this room today talking about AI, but the constraint on America's AI future, and as I mentioned, I think reindustrialization more broadly is in many ways

atoms and not algorithms.

So, you know, you two are both building

fundamental pieces of this physical infrastructure for the, that the future AI economy can't live without.

So maybe just for the audience to get started, why don't you briefly explain what you both build and, and why these physical industries matter?

Uh, yeah.

So, uh, Mariana Minerals is a software-first minerals mining and refining company.

Um, when I say software-first, what that means is that about a quarter of the company is software engineers, machine learning engineers, uh, that are developing 3 core operating systems,

uh, to accelerate project delivery, uh, and, uh, increase the amount of autonomy that we see in minerals operations and, and refining operations.

Capital Project OS is basically a product lifecycle management tool, is the way to think about it, but that goes from process development and mine development all the way through engineering,

construction, procurement, and doing agentic workflow automation kind of through that stack.

Plant OS is how we use reinforcement learning to control refineries, and Mine OS is again how we use reinforcement learning to control, do short interval autonomous control of mining

operations.

But we do not sell software.

We are not a SaaS company.

We develop, we engineer, build and operate mineral minerals projects.

And so we have a copper mine that's operating in southeast Utah that's producing high-grade copper materials today, uh, high-purity copper materials today.

Uh, and we're building a lithium refinery in Texas with the goal of building 10 projects in the next 10 years.

How about you, Drew?

Yeah, so, uh, first, thank you for having me today here representing the Heron Power team.

So at Heron Power, we build, um, power electronics to accelerate the electricity sector.

Um, Over the last 4 decades, you know, in parallel with the Moore's Law improvement of transistors in compute, there's been a similar improvement in power transistors.

And over those decades, it's enabled more and more applications.

You know, we see them in our— how we charge our phones and telecommunications in data centers.

But really, that, that improvement hasn't been brought to the grid itself.

And in a time of growing demand, for electricity for so many different reasons, all of them positive.

And the fact that electricity growth and energy growth is correlated with economic growth and prosperity, we need new solutions.

And luckily the power semiconductor space is, is ready to bring those solutions.

And I'm excited to do that.

At Herrenpower, we're focused on building solid-state transformers to use silicon and software to replace steel, oil, and copper in power conversion at data centers, large-scale energy

installations like solar and battery projects, others.

Amazing.

So the US government has made it a pretty clear and loud priority to reshore critical supply chains from critical minerals, advanced manufacturing, and, you know, there's also been

a lot of focus in the AI race against China.

So maybe in plain terms, where does it leave us if American companies like yours don't exist and win?

Yeah, I can take that first.

Well, this power semiconductor capability that is enabling solid-state transformers actually is the outgrowth of, uh, many decades of partnership between the federal government and,

uh, academia and industry.

Um, both the DOE and the Navy have focused a lot on advanced semiconductors.

Um, so it just makes sense that the place where, you know, this technology was first developed should be the place where it, all the benefits are commercialized.

Um, the world's leading

biggest producer of silicon carbide, which is a key power semiconductor, is based, you know, here in the US.

And so we should be, you know, leveraging the applications of that technology here first, manufacturing here at home.

And if we don't, we're basically losing all the benefits that accrue from that technology to other countries.

And I don't think we should do that.

Yeah, I think put plainly, you know, the US is 50 years behind on critical mineral supply.

And so if we're not innovating in the critical minerals space, we will be perpetually behind.

And the things that China does right now to accelerate— And when you say behind, do you mean specifically behind China?

Specifically behind China, but I would say also globally, we have a couple of decades of lag.

The things that we can do at the top level are accelerate permitting.

We can make project-level finance more available, but that doesn't actually solve the underlying problem, which is that we are too slow at designing, building, and ramping up new minerals

capacity.

Even after we have license to operate.

And so Mariana is laser focused on that phase of project development, which is you have to get things permitted.

Yes.

But once you start building, it can take 5 years to get something built and then it can take 3 or 3 to 5 years to get something actually operating at rate.

Uh, and that's why we're laser focused on that so that even if we kind of start to lower the burdens to play catch up with China, we actually have to go faster than China does.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, you know, both of you spent a long time at Tesla.

Drew, you spent 18 years at Tesla.

You're like something thing of a deity among power electronics nerds, I would say.

And now you work on grid-scale power systems, which is, which is different.

So when you looked at the grid, what convinced you to leave Tesla and tackle this problem?

This, I think, seemingly unsexy, unsexy problem.

And in this way, and maybe adding on to that, what does it actually take in terms of time, cost, regulatory hurdles?

To, to do this in the US?

Big question there.

Two questions.

I apologize.

Yeah.

Well, I was— I had a front row seat to an amazing set of impactful innovations at the grid's edge, right?

EVs becoming more affordable, you know, not just more affordable, but more omnipresent around us,

building the supercharging infrastructure to support those electric vehicles and then working on grid storage.

I was responsible for, you know, the Megapack and scaling the energy business.

At Tesla.

And all along the way, what I saw was even though there's so much innovation happening at the edge of the grid, on the other side of the wire, there's really been no change.

You know, the, the systems underpinning the grid today are the same largely mechanical systems that were developed over 100 years ago.

And you don't get control, you don't get monitoring,

you end up with an overbuilt system that is fragile.

And also there's not a lot of suppliers providing that equipment, and most of them are actually headquartered overseas.

And that just doesn't seem like a a secure position for such critical infrastructure for us to have here in the United States.

What does it take to get things done here?

I think you can.

I mean, I built the mega factory with my team.

You know, my team was super awesome in—

hello— in Lathrop, California, in 11 months.

It was a JCPenney warehouse.

11 months later, the first product came off the line.

But ultimately what it comes down to is alignment.

You know, when you're working with your local jurisdiction, they can use the process for a code-compliant project to say no at every step, or they can say yes at every step.

And so how do we as a collective, you know, gain alignment that building, reindustrializing the US, building critical infrastructure and supporting our critical supply chains here in

the US is a good thing, and, and identifying ways to say yes at every step along the way and really accelerate these processes.

Versus no.

And when you do find that, it can be magical.

That's been my experience.

And I know in particular, you've talked, we, you know, we've talked about sort of labor costs and labor shortages, and oftentimes people point to that as the reason why they can't get

things done in the US.

But what's your experience then?

Yeah, I mean, these, today's factories are really automated.

If you're building a new factory today, you know, in China or the US, the labor differential is less than 10% of cost of goods sold.

It might even be less than 5%.

But what actually is driving the competitiveness

of the, of the different locations in my mind is it comes down to supply chain and how do we develop co-located critical supply chains in the United States where the logistics costs

are much, much shorter and much, much lower because the logistics time is much, much shorter.

If you look at, you know, China, they are so thoughtful about building these industrial areas.

You know, everything that you could possibly need to build a car which has 7,000 parts in it, you know, is within less than a 3-hour drive.

Getting to that kind of co-location of the supply base in the United States would be a major unlock, along with automation, while still providing immense numbers of, of, of like high-paying,

you know, important jobs.

I think that's a vision that I, I'd like to advocate for.

Yeah.

And I, I mean, when we're talking about jobs on the, within factories, this isn't, you know, your grandfather, great-grandfather's, supply chain,

assembly line, factory floor.

These are, you know, technical jobs may require training, but yes, you know, have skill and the pay associated with that.

100%.

Okay, Turner, the US government ranks onshoring critical minerals as essential to economic and national security.

It's been in the news a lot for the last year.

Rare earths, critical minerals, you know, these things feel very bottlenecked.

Yet so much of the processing capacity for these materials sits overseas, especially in geopolitical rivals, namely China.

So given that vulnerability, how does Mariana Minerals work, help the U.S.

reclaim not just the extraction side, the actual mining, but processing and supply chain sovereignty for critical minerals?

Yeah, so, you know, we focus on the full chain from mining all the way through refining.

You have to focus on the full chain.

That handoff in the middle leads to a lot of actual, like, market inefficiencies.

I think the, you know, we've, we're making a big bet on autonomy fundamentally.

Like we're making a big bet on the fact that we can build systems that enable us to engineer things faster using large language models, accelerate the procurement lifecycle, uh, and

do autonomous short interval control of construction operations where you're really doing resource balancing between what materials do you have on site, what's your list of tasks, uh,

list of tasks, and what people do you have on site.

And kind of like doing that optimization is all things that can be done algorithmically.

Um, and then we're making big bets on autonomy and refineries.

Where we use reinforcement learning to actually remove humans from the loop in determining how refineries operate.

And so when you have a highly variable feedstock, 'cause the Earth is heterogeneous, you need to constantly be tuning the temperatures, the flow rates, the chemical addition rates,

the residence times of a highly complex refining circuit.

And we don't have that labor pool here that has that embedded know-how that can walk up to a refinery and quickly get it operating on spec and then also manage that variability.

And the same is true on the mining side of things where

Mining at those mine sites, we're making thousands of decisions a day.

And when you don't have that labor pool of folks that are able to make the right decisions, the right thousand decisions, that can cascade into low productivity, low availability of

equipment, and low utilization of equipment.

And but the software angle is really not enough.

And we kind of talked about how we're vertically integrated.

The gate to software penetration, really not the gate, what sets the rate of software penetration and technology penetration into these plants and into these mines ultimately is the

operating teams.

It's like, what is the tech stack that they're comfortable with?

And then for the most part, it is pen and paper and maybe 150 spreadsheets that are kind of scattered around an operation.

And, um, what, what you need to do in order to actually accelerate software uptake in the space is you have to go down into that operating layer, understand the core problems that they're

facing, but then also really control the culture and make sure that the, the, the software tools themselves are designed for the folks that are gonna have to be interfacing with them.

Um, and that's why we think that sitting the software engineers right next to the operating teams, but but not in like a forward deploy engineer type way where everyone has the same

incentives is what's gonna yield the best results when it comes to trying to optimize these assets.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Um, now you, you both, as I mentioned before, you both came out of Tesla.

It's one of the companies that proved the template for American dynamism success, built factories in America for the first time in a long time.

Uh, Turner, you led Tesla's, uh, mineral, minerals and metals team.

Drew, you ran powertrain and energy.

What does the Tesla model give you that a traditional industrial company doesn't have?

And what is genuinely different maybe about building in your new respective sectors that you didn't expect relative to Tesla?

Yeah, I'd say there, I'd say there are 3 big ones and they might overlap a little bit with Drew's, but I think that the general like techno optimism and like the what technology can

do in this, in these sectors is much, much higher at Tesla, right?

The belief that you can innovate on systems that are old and archaic is like at the core of the company.

The other is a general, like, appetite for risk, which enables super fast decision-making and enables the teams to move really quickly without being burdened with, you know, fear of

making the wrong decision.

And the last is like a clear, you know, firm commitment to not giving up on projects that have the outcome.

Like, if the outcome is worth it, like, we at Tesla will like fight through the challenges of getting to that outcome.

And I think what we see, at least in the minerals industry, is like folks we'll give it a shot for a year.

You know, people have tried to do autonomy in mining for a long time,

and generally a lot of companies will just end up, you know, they'll fail, they'll put it on the shelf, or they'll isolate it into a small team that goes and they don't get really tapped

again.

And Tesla does a really good job of just like barreling through the challenges as long as the outcome is worth it.

I would add a couple more

aspects of it.

Like, you know, many times in Tesla's history,

you know, the company's future success, really like whether or not the paycheck will clear, you know, was bet on the team within the company executing well.

And that is a very like focusing reality.

And it drives people to do their best work.

And I, and, and like you end up needing to manifest that outcome.

You know, it's, I hate to say do or die, but it's equivalent to that.

So that's, that's something that exists uniquely within startups.

I mean, I think I think, you know, Turner and I are going to try to bring that, are bringing that to our own teams, but, um, and, and wouldn't be in an, in a legacy industrial, you

know, you know, company.

Uh, the other thing is, um, there was always a clear vision of the purpose of the company, and that's like a beacon for talent, right?

People are like, oh, I want to work on that.

That's like, that sounds amazing.

And so you get to basically pick from the best already.

Um, and then You're in this high-growth environment.

Anybody who is excited about their career trajectory and having a trend in a good direction is also going to want to work there and then is also going to want to stay there and see

it through because their impact is real.

They see the impact of their actions on the outcomes around them, and then those outcomes result in their own growth, right?

They move from one part of the company like Turner did to another,

or myself, I mean, my career history.

So I think Those are, are, are, are, are in stark comparison to like a, you know, multi-product conglomerate, industrial conglomerate that's selling the same thing today that they,

they were selling, you know, decades ago, or a mining company that's got 150 years of heritage.

So, um, that's a hard thing to replicate, not in a startup, and it's a hard thing to maintain within a startup, but I, I think it's really important to getting things done.

Yeah.

Yeah, totally.

Um, talking about kind of getting things done and building that team and, uh, about being able to hire.

You know, one thing that jumps out is both of your companies are building real facilities that will create real jobs.

Turner, your initial lithium and copper projects should add, you know, over 500 construction jobs and additional full-time jobs in the next 18 months, with many more as you scale operations.

Drew, your— Heron is getting ready to build out its first large factory, which should also be something around 500 jobs.

And, you know, that's just the first factory of many.

What have you both learned about building an industrial workforce in the US in 2026?

I think you have to be creative here in the US.

We are reindustrializing, and I can't just go to like a phone tree of power electronics manufacturing engineers or production associates.

And I mean, in my background, I built, I was responsible for building along with my team, the 4680 program manufacturing facility, a 50-gigawatt-hour battery facility in Texas.

This.

And, you know, at that point, there were really not a lot of battery operations in the United States.

So you instead have to look for analogs.

So I was hiring people out of high-speed bottling plants and out of, you know, syringe manufacturing facilities where they're making billions of syringes.

And, you know, if you can get that creative hat going, you find that there's immense depth of talent in the US and people are excited to work in new industries.

And you build that shared vision of the future.

And I'm very positive about what you can get accomplished here.

Yeah, I would say that looking at analog industries is a great point.

It's the, you know, for the mining industry, we're in a similar position where we're kind of— we've had 35 years of just meaningful attrition in the labor pool.

But the oil and gas sector has a bunch of extremely good talent.

And the software space, you know, a lot of the underlying optimization algorithms that we're writing for our plants, they look very, very similar to the optimization algorithms that

are in dog walking apps and Uber ride optimization, underwriting loans, ad optimization.

And so

So the, there is transferability in the, in the like broader US talent pool.

What's important is building that talent magnet.

And it's a, it's an interesting one for us because, you know, the, the, the mining industry, like the villains in every movie are the, the resource extraction folks.

And so we have to, we have to like combat that and kind of say that— Make mining sexy again.

That, well, that's, that's right.

That's exactly right.

Yeah.

Finally, I know we're at time, but if you had one specific and actionable ask for the people in this room that would materially speed up production, onshore manufacturing create jobs

in the next 12 to 24 months?

What would, what would you say?

You have the floor.

I'll go, I'll go first.

I think the, you know, if we have a minerals mandate, what we should do is we should look at everything that was done in the last 50 years for oil and gas when we had an energy mandate,

and we still have an energy mandate.

And, you know, that's a lot of asks boiled down into one, but there are a lot of tools in the toolkit.

And I think the most important thing is providing the right incentive structure that mobilizes the private capital markets behind these projects so that they're confident that there

is a market in the long term and that the rug isn't going to get pulled out from, from under them in an industry that, you know, for the last 30 years really hasn't been built out in

the US.

Yeah, I think durable industrial policy that you can plan around.

I mean, I'm very pro manufacturing in the United States, building these technologies in the United States.

but you know, my suppliers, maybe my financiers are not as certain.

So yeah, durable industrial policy driving in this direction.

I think a concerted effort between the federal government and the states to identify areas of like energy and manufacturing buildout, like so you can get those co-located supply chains

that I mentioned before would be a major win.

You know, where, where the local jurisdictions are getting to yes with you rather than trying to find ways to say no all the way along the project.

And then the last thing is I'm a fan of the electricity sector.

I think it's enabling so much growth.

I like the idea of a Federal Highway Trust Fund for the, for the, for the grid.

It never has existed.

And that's sort of why we have this patchwork.

How do we find a, you know, master plan of buildout of linear infrastructure that maybe connects those, you know, manufacturing, energy, buildout zones to improve resilience, reduce

costs, and really move us forward as a nation.

Awesome.

Thanks so much.

You heard it here.

Great.

Thanks.

Thanks.

Thank you.