Mariana Minerals CEO and former Tesla Senior Manager @tbc415: vertically integrating for the sake of vertically integrating doesn't make any sense. Every vertical integration decision needs to boil down to one question, especially early on: does the company exist or not if you don't make the decision to vertically integrate? "That makes a decision easy." "That could be a number of drivers—the part doesn't exist, the technology doesn't exist, or the cost is so insanely high that the company can't exist by not vertically integrating into the thing." "You should not be vertically integrating just because you can save 5%, 10%, 20%, 50%, on a subcomponent that does not check the box of: does the company exist or not if we don't?" "Eventually, once you start to have a large team and you're driving down unit cost, that's where the cost-driven vertical integration starts to become an interesting and a much longer decision." "Folks that do anything in your supply chain—they are carrying risk in those activities. You're not eliminating a supply chain point, you're actually expanding your supply chain interactions because if you vertically integrate into something that's upstream, they have their own supply chain that you now have to absorb." With @espricewright and @_chandlerl(a16z)