Dino Mavrookas: America Needs to Build Ships Again

**Molly O'Shea** (0:00)
The US used unmanned sea drones for the first time during a recent attack in Iran, and a company here in Austin created those drones. Saronic is a defense tech company that focuses on creating boat-like sea drones for the military.

**Dino Mavrookas** (0:13)
Not just the defense market, but the entire maritime industry is centered around autonomy. That's what we're building for at Saronic. We're actually gonna be able to launch a hypersonic missile off of the back of Marauder, which is an autonomous ship, before the Navy completes their first test of a hypersonic missile off of a manned vessel.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:30)
That's crazy.

**Dino Mavrookas** (0:31)
If we ever actually do get into a conflict in Taiwan Strait that leads to World War III or anything dramatic, China can now produce the rest of the world in terms of ships. China now builds the US. 230 to 1 The naval fleet that we have today is actually shrinking. They built over 1,000 commercial ships last year. The United States built five.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:49)
One last question. It's the most difficult question. Some people had to walk out of the room because I asked this question.

**Dino Mavrookas** (0:55)
I won't walk out on you.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:57)
What is your hottest take right now? Dino, welcome back. This is your second trip. We recently just went into your facility, looked at all the corsairs and we just saw a mirage. And now we're here in, I don't know, what do you call this space?

**Dino Mavrookas** (1:23)
This is our all hand space. This is where we bring the team together. We hold fun events. We just had our Christmas party here. I think we had over a thousand people at our last Christmas party. So this is a collaborative area where folks can come together, work in a really casual space, bring the production team together with the engineering team and just make sure that we continuously are collaborating and just sharing information across the company.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:46)
To set the table, we talked a bit about your stats when we started the last walking tour. And if you haven't watched it, you should watch it. But so you're now at over a $9 billion valuation. You raised $2.6 billion.
You've just announced this was a little debate. Is it still going to be fresh in a month? I think so. But Port Alpha, $3 billion, Port Alpha. So I guess to bring all that to focus against the backdrop of what's going on in America, I'd love for you to lay out the stats that we're working with. Palantir CTO, Shom, just talked about this, but we're ratioed by China in shipbuilding.

**Dino Mavrookas** (2:24)
It's actually pretty crazy. So China outbuilds the US. 230 to 1
The naval fleet that we have today is actually shrinking. So there's right around 290 ships in our naval fleet. In 2018, Congress actually set a statutory minimum of 355 ships. That was eight years ago.
And we're going in the wrong direction. In 2024, the Navy actually looked at it and said, Oh, we don't actually need 355 We need 381 And these are just manned ships, let alone all the unmanned ships that we're going to need in our fleet. And the shipbuilding infrastructure that we have in this country today just won't support that. That's why we started Saronic. That's why we started building autonomy. That's why we focused so heavily on production and manufacturing. Not just of Corsair and Mirage, which we saw earlier, but of Marauder and now of Port Alpha, much larger ships. How do we start actually building both defense and like large defense and large commercial ships in this country again?

**Molly O'Shea** (3:32)
I want to talk a little bit about the bureaucracy and what's kind of like entangled there.

**Dino Mavrookas** (3:38)
Where are we going to start?

**Molly O'Shea** (3:40)
I know. So in that clip of Shom, he was talking about how bureaucracy has just clogged up the system, and so much so that it resulted to this. So what is kind of the state of that? I mean, we just had Rob on and he was talking about acquisition reform.

**Dino Mavrookas** (3:57)
Yeah. Well, he leads that effort for us. Front and center every single day, he's dealing with the Navy customer. What I will say is, I'll kind of give two sides of it. One, there has been movement, right? I was in the SEAL teams for 11 years, 2004 to 2015 Well, that's five years we're on SEAL team six. Again, this is the fastest I've actually seen the government move with anything. So there is a lot of urgency around it. The new administration is putting a lot of focus in this area. You see the president's budget request for $1.5 trillion.