Caitlin Kalinowski: evaluation

Transcript context

…Oh, yeah. What an endorsement. Yeah. Basically, it's like this amazing robot vacuum that just works. So his question, so he wanted to ask you, and so he suggested to ask you this, is about memory prices. The way he described it is there's a meteor called memory prices that are coming for consumer hardware, and robotics, and physical AI. What's going on there? Yeah, we are in trouble as an industry. And I'm not an expert on this, but I think that AI has to do with why. And I also think that the supply chain is constrained. I have been advising startups and companies to pre-buy memory, and to have enough memory in stock, if they can afford it, to ride out price spikes. Like anything in this category, let's see, this happened in COVID too. So we had so many supply chain disruptions, and getting enough memory was one of the challenges. So we had to pre-buy as well. I won't say who, but the company I was working with had to pre-buy memory as well. And so this is part of what I wanted to talk to you about today, is these supply chain disruptions. And if a key component that goes into a lot of tech, like memory or silicon, is constrained, there's not much you can do. You either pay, or you have already pre-bought enough that you can ride things out. And so those are the only real options. Obviously there's a risk to pre-buying, and the price might go down. And so the challenge is, I think, there's a latency with supply chain in something like memory, where it can't adapt fast enough, often, to demand, or there's a new category of product, or, in this case, maybe data centers, that are just eating up so much and are actually not as cost-sensitive as somebody in consumer electronics like Matic might be. And so they'll just pay for these higher costs. This is tricky and something we have to deal with all the time. How much have prices gone up? How bad is this problem, and where do you think it'll go?…

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