Alex Modon

speaker

170 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 11 Jun

Alex Modon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The a16z Show · Designing the Physical World with AI · 11 Jun 2026 podcast

And it's not, you know, always standardized.

But yeah.

I do think there is a lot of, there's a lot of tacit knowledge in the industry that helps be more like a shortcut or a rule of thumb to the right answer that you can just first principles drive.

So there is a scenario where you, you know, you could do a heck of a lot more work when your marginal cost goes to zero, it's totally fine, we solve the problem.

But like where it really is, isn't like the trades, like the electrician and how they work.

And there is an incredible amount of tacit knowledge there, which, yeah, I think is both a,

Yeah, like a challenge.

And yes, we need so many more of them.

I don't know if this is this could totally be the wrong number, but I would guess that the average salary of an electrician in Texas right now is higher than like a Silicon Valley software engineer.

Like it's incredible, like super demanded.

Oh, my goodness.

People are turning to manufacturing for a lot of the data center scope just because there's not enough people in the trades to build these projects.

And so the only alternative is you mass manufacture these things where you can concentrate labor in a modular scenario.

Okay.

even at a premium from a cost perspective.

So yeah, there is, again, it's a little bit of an all of the above strategy where you would need to say, yeah, we should totally be training more people on very practical skills that are going to be needed for a while.

And then hopefully start to codify a lot of that so that when we really want to go into scale mode in a real world of abundance, when like intelligence falls to zero, then yeah, it'd be great to embody that into robotics too.

Yeah, I mean, for us, it's like...

I don't know, if you look at like basically any, in the US at least, any construction metric, so like labor productivity or adjusted CapEx numbers over the past like 50 years, we're getting worse.

And I, you know, my past life, I come from the world of software where it's just like de facto everything gets better.

Showing 141–160 of 170 · page 8 of 9