Axios Recap | Brandon Daniels' View From the Top Conversation with Hope King

Hey, thank you.

Yeah. So I lied. I will ask a question. Okay. Has anyone heard anything about trade being volatile right now? Raise your hand. Has anyone heard anything about tariffs? Right. 10 years ago, did anyone think supply chain was sexy? Yeah. Okay, there you go. A couple of nerd duels. So let's be real. The world is outsourced. We hear from our clients that 90% of the cost of manufacturing the products that they deliver to their customers, 90% of it is the goods that they purchase from third party companies, from their supply chains. And so we're completely fragile to the supply chains that support us, right? And you know that has been increasing since the 80s. The entire world is deverticalized, right? And so you've had increasing specialization across all industry sectors. It doesn't matter if we're talking about servers or weapon systems or pharmaceuticals. There are companies that just manufacture this specific API or chemical or excipient that goes into upstream drugs, right? And that hyperspecialization has led to globalization as well, and just-in-time delivery has afforded that globalization. So when you think about what has happened, the world has diversified, it's expanded, and most companies' entire operation is actually a group of hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of companies that are downstream from them. So that kind of exponential scale creates a need for people to get visibility to it, and most people, most CEOs, 67% of CEOs can't see past their even tier ones, right? So there's a lot of issues in terms of visibility. The second problem is there's pervasive risk. So at the end of 2024, we were dealing with an issue where every single day it felt like there was a new supply chain issue. There were multiple hurricanes. If everybody remembers Hurricane Helene in Europe. There were torrential rains. There were actually the equivalent of hurricanes in the Mediterranean. You also had China impose export controls on germanium, gallium, antimony to the United States. Critical minerals for all advanced technology. And I'm not just talking defense. I'm talking satellites. I'm talking advanced computing. I'm talking critical components for our quantum computing future. And so you have multiple risks that were all happening at once. And if you remember, there were pervasive labor strikes, and remember there were all of those labor strikes that hit the ports. And so it felt like every day we were updating our clients on something new. How are they ever supposed to prioritize when they have hundreds of thousands of suppliers meeting a multitude, a pervasive explosion of risk? What you need are systems that can first help you to map those multi-tier supply chains. And our artificial intelligence, the most advanced in the world. We're the largest company in the world doing this. You need to be able to map those supply chains. You need to be able to monitor and manage that risk. You need to be able to assess the severity, impact, and priority of that risk so that you can actually start to get this in some semblance of order. It's the same problems that we had as cyber grew 10 years ago, but also in real time.

You're absolutely right. Think about it as a central nervous system, right? So when we build out these supply chains and we have the ability to do anything from take an MPN and turn it into all of its constituent parts, show you where all the fabs are, show you where all the assemblies are, or break down a pharmaceutical component, an individual antibiotic, and show you all of the places and parts and components and suppliers that are responsible for manufacturing that product. When we geolocate all of that, it's kind of like we can now monitor it like the central nervous system, and we can tell you when there's a paper cut, ignore it. Or we can tell you when you just got shot directly to the center mass and we should figure something out. And that's what's happening, by the way, with the weaponization of the periodic table with China right now. And so where we are with critical minerals, it's a shot to the center mass and we have to start figuring it out. And you can really in advance tell your clients and they can actually be again taking those proactive actions. Exactly.