Here is Steve Levine on the Realignment podcast discussing the US/China Great EV battery war:
The 2020s are lost. Even if a decision is made now, it takes a while to get going. US companies including Tesla will be reliant on the Chinese supply chain for the whole 2020s. And if you’re look at chips, what’s happening there, that’s batteries for the 2020s. That’s not good, but the US can make the right decisions for the 2030s.
… When speaking of being dismayed, I’ve been dismayed at how — apart from Musk — how unvisionary, nongutsy to other players are. Musk and China anticipated the market. They built their chain before there was any hope that there would be demand for what they were going to produce. They had a vision.
Where’s the vision? Where is the guts? I’m going to put down on this bet. I’m going to harken back to the Gilded Age with steel barons, oil barons, railroad barons — those guys had character problems. But they had guts, willing to put down bets. What’s happened to us Americans?
The criticism of Silicon Valley is that, while they have produced great software companies, most startups aren’t taking great technical risk. The way to build SaaS, for example, is pretty well established. Most of the challenge is differentiation and execution.
But Elon Musk did seem to spark a new wave of visionary investment which has come to be known as New Space. Just like the PayPal mafia spread out a range of important companies, employees at SpaceX have been a tremendous source of talent for new space startups that could become massive in the next decade.
I think people underestimate the challenges involved with large scale computer networks that have been built out, and the natural tendency for people to spread out in search of new opportunities (such as into the “deep tech” ecosystem). They want to apply software to solve even more difficult hardware problems. This tendency is permissible in the private economy through entrepreneurial action — which is really the recognition of a misallocation of resources in the economy.
In DoD, entrepreneurial action is somewhat constrained. Vision and guts means there is not an articulated plan with costs and benefits fully stated for any third-party expert to evaluate. These documented plans are a precondition to approval.
In a way, vision and guts means the decision to allocate funds to a project is nonconsensual. It relies on anticipations of what can be accomplished, and an incentive to pull it off.
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